Contextualising university-school STEM education collaboration through distributed leadership

Implementing educational reform requires partnerships, and university-school collaborations in the form of investigative and experimental projects can aim to determine the practicalities of reform. However, there are funded projects that do not achieve intended outcomes. In the context of a new reform initiative in education, namely, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, this study explores the management of a government funded project. In a university-school partnership for STEM education, how can leadership be distributed for achieving project outcomes? Findings indicated that leadership roles were distributed and self-activated by project partners according to their areas of expertise and proximal activeness to the project phases