The research reported in this article builds on work commenced eight years ago with reviewing the literature and models of successful school leadership for improved student outcomes. When the findings of this review were combined with the results from case studies of successful schools it resulted in a preliminary model of successful school principalship. We examined a range of areas using further analysis of the case study data, detailed analysis of the subsequent quantitative surveys (developed in part from the preliminary model) and actual school literacy and numeracy results. We also included a measure of teacher perceptions of student social development. This inclusion is consistent with evidence that social skills have become many times more important in determining students' relative life chances in the 21st Century than cognitive outcomes alone. The final part of our research used model building and powerful multi-level statistical analyses of the survey data. In this way, we examined all the factors that may influence a school's success with student outcomes. Model building allowed us to construct inherently logical and theoretically defensible representations of the "world" in which successful schools exist, and the models can be statistically tested to see how well these representations explain the reality portrayed by the data collected.