School leaders have been given an important role in initiating and implementing school improvement, which demands new forms of leadership. This invokes the question of the basic competences for leadership that are presently required. This article focuses on the formulation of competences for school leaders in the Netherlands with the aim of…

The aim of the study was to explore the impact of collaboration across small schools on the development of leadership capacity. Despite a growing body of research on school leadership, little is known about its function and development in small schools (defined here as NOR less than 120). Small schools, of which there are about 2700 in England,…

In this article, the role that formal leaders play in helping distributed leadership take root and flourish in schools is explored. The focus of the study is an urban middle school, one of six cases in a larger three-year investigation of distributed leadership in two mid-Atlantic states. Using interview and document-based data, the authors…

In recent years the UK secondary educational landscape has witnessed significant change, with the introduction of an ever-extending spectrum of competing government initiatives and policies. This has resulted in the steady erosion of the traditionally recognized role of headteacher. This paper presents the results of a practitioner-based study…

This article is based on a synthesis study of school leadership development conducted for the National College of School Leadership (NCSL) in England. It first outlines a perspective on leadership focusing on the concepts of wisdom, deliberation and higher order capacities. Then it describes and assesses two distinct models of leadership learning,…

How leaders learn to become leaders has been an area of much research. When asked what were the key experiences in learning leadership, leaders often speak of the importance of "on-the-job" experiences, yet these experiences are rarely fully detailed in the research literature. The importance of "apprenticeships" and being attached to institutions…

Work-shadowing is an under-researched aspect of leadership development. This paper places workshadowing in the broader context of responses to the challenges of managing leadership succession in schools, drawing on an evaluation of a pilot shadowing programme for aspiring primary headteachers. The paper identifies a number of key themes in…

This article is focused on the concept of partnership within the learning relationship. It develops the argument that leaders' personal experiences of reciprocal learning relationships will influence their leadership practice, and thus ultimately the school culture. The examination of values and beliefs is central to this process. The co-creation…

In times of constant change, teachers need to be flexible, adaptable and creative. This article argues that promoting creativity of staff to enhance twenty-first century learning is a fundamental challenge for school leadership today. Drawing on the findings of a research and development project involving senior leadership teams and a local…

This article reports on part of the data from the International Study of Principal Preparation (ISPP) introduced in our previous article in "School Leadership and Management." The purpose of the study is to consider the relationship between preparation for headship and the leadership and management practice of novice headteachers. In this article…

As part of a CfBT Education Trust funded study, we investigated the practical steps school leaders can take to ensure that self-evaluation of school performance led, through the effective staff development, to genuine school improvement. On the journey from self-evaluation to school improvement our research identified what schools did that worked,…

This article maps the key features of the community contexts in which a range of challenging urban schools are located, highlighting the community-related issues facing school leaders. Whilst recognising the growing demands on school leaders and the need to reconfigure leadership, the author also identifies steps which they can take to strengthen…

This paper provides an overview of the quantitative features of research design adopted in the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF; formerly DfES) funded, longitudinal mixed method study intended to investigate the impact of school leadership on pupil outcomes. It outlines the way quantitative analyses of national assessment and…

This article provides an overview of the literature concerning successful school leadership. It draws on the international literature and is derived from a more extensive review of the literature completed in the early stage of the authors' project. The prime purpose of this review is to summarise the main findings from the wealth of empirical…

This paper extends the introduction to the authors' study of successful school leadership and how it influences pupil outcomes begun in the Editorial introduction. Critical to an appreciation especially of the external validity of their results is an understanding of the policy context in which the English leaders in their study found themselves;…