Transformationer af skoleledelse: En systemteoretisk analyse af hvordan betingelser for skoleledelse forandres med læring som genstand i perioden 1958-2020

This thesis is about the contemporary phenomenon leadership for learning that emerged around the latest school reform in the Danish public school in 2014. The school reform formulates a governing intention to improve the Danish public school academically by increasing the student learning by installing student learning as a central driving force for the organization, management and leadership of the school. Learning becomes the central concept of the school. The concept of learning becomes not only a professional core concept but also a reform concept, a concept for management and a principle for school leadership.
The dissertation shows how the intention to reform the school with learning as the centering driving force not only creates a centering and centripetal driving force that is able to focus, simplify, and orient the school’s activities and development around children’s learning as the natural unifying and self-evident center of the school. Simultaneously with these efforts, however, a counter-effect is also created - a centrifugal force that produces extra-effects and complexity that school management also must deal with in the school’s practical life.
The dissertation describes the contemporary phenomenon of leadership for learning and observes extra-effects and complexity related to leadership for learning, by analyzing and describing how conditions for school leadership change with learning as a principle.
Changes in conditions for school leadership with the concept of learning as a principle become the object of the dissertation’s observation point through two empirical analyzes with theoretical anchoring in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory observing political, practice-guiding and practice-debating documents concerning the Danish state school 1958-2020
Firstly, a semantic analysis of the semantic development of the concept of learning. Secondly, a functional analysis of school leadership. The conclusion of the dissertation combines these two analyzes of learning as semantics and school management as a function and creates a description of changes in conditions for school management with learning as principle for school leadership.