System leadership in China? Conceptualising “Education Collectives” as formal school partnerships through the dragon boat metaphor

System leadership is increasingly and normatively used to describe administrative practices across education institutions. However, we argue that what is spreading are policy conditions encouraging multiple institutions to share governance arrangements. This requires new forms of leadership, which summons and reifies the researchable, but malleable category of “system leadership”. In this article, we analyse interview data from the constituent Principals and Executive Principal of a formal multi-institutional collaboration in China—an “education collective”. Deprivileging the global-north-orientated label of system leadership, we conceptualise their practices instead through the metaphor of the Chinese dragon boat, whose crew has distinct roles that speak to Chinese epistemologies. We seek thereby to de-colonise and enrich system leadership and suggest future directions for conceptualisations of leadership.