The Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) has reduced the practice of educational leadership in those jurisdictions experiencing it to totalitarian managerialism by numbers, corporatised, privatised and performative. Such leadership is unable to address the contemporary challenges that confront educational leaders. Educative leadership has been proposed as a corrective but is conceptualised variously and inconsistently across the literature. In this article, we make two contributions. First, we elaborate a new schema for educative leadership by drawing from and building on extant conceptualisations. We propose this schema to the field as a heuristic and intellectual resource for use in elaborating, identifying and developing educative leadership in multiple contexts. Second, we apply our schema to two sets of professional standards for school leaders in England: headteachers and multi-academy trust CEOs. This application enables our argument that these contemporary authoritative policy texts are anti-educative in constructing and privileging forms of leadership that will require dismantling before more educative forms can be created.