This article examines the leadership of school principals who, based on the narrative case of the Blueberry School, discuss how they as principals would have responded to a similar problematic situation regarding a school change process. The study is grounded in the context of the Norwegian National School Leadership Programme. Theoretically, the…

Latin American educational policy has relied on the assumption that better preparation can help school leaders improve their professional performance, thus improving quality of schools. Training programs for present or future school leaders have proliferated in the region, often publicly financed, but without enough evidence of their impact. Using…

This study explores how six school leadership teams in a rural district in California responded to professional development (PD) designed to strengthen leadership practices and organizational conditions in schools for improving teaching and learning. Specifically, the PD was intended to address the problem of practice identified by the schools:…

This paper examines the preparation of school principals in Malaysia, and the aspiration of the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025 to ensure high-performing school leaders in every school. It reports on the principal preparatory programme, the National Professional Qualification for Educational Leaders, which is mandatory to those who aspire…

School leadership has been shown to exert a positive but mostly indirect influence on school and student outcomes. Currently, there is great interest in how quality leadership preparation is related to leadership practice and improved teacher outcomes. The purpose of the study was to understand the moderating influence of leadership preparation on…

The Education Reform Act 1988 increased the scope of headteachers' work and led to an emphasis on "management", often interpreted as the implementation of government policies, checked through the Ofsted inspection regime. Following the election of a Labour government in 1997, the discourse changed to "leadership". Leadership…

This article reports the findings of a small-scale investigation into the perspectives of Chinese school leaders (school principals and deputy principals) on their leadership learning opportunities. The research draws on key policy documents and semi-structured interviews within a phenomenographic framework based on a cluster sample of ten school…

This article explores the ways in which senior leaders in the learning and skills sector understand learning leadership and the influence on shaping their practice through the lens of senior leaders participating in a leadership programme. The article examines the extent to which personal theories of leadership are formed from our earliest…

Among western governments large-scale leadership development initiatives represent an increasingly deployed means of promoting the acculturation of school leaders to support educational reforms and ongoing improvement. England's sophisticated initiative centres on the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children's Services, a…

This article is written from the perspective of a practising headteacher in the context of the "Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers" (LSPH), now renamed "Head for the Future," and builds on an earlier treatment of the ideological background of LPSH and its construction of self in relation to approaches to educational leadership through…

This article analyses the views of selected headteachers on the impact of the 10-year basic education policy on the leadership skills of secondary school headteachers in Botswana. Research literature on school leadership and management in Botswana is sparse. Despite this, demands for effective leadership in schools have continued as the education…

Teacher leadership is a concept that is gaining increasing interest from both practitioners and researchers. This article presents findings from three case studies in the UK that can be characterized as exhibiting developed, emergent and restricted teacher leadership. Differences and similarities between the schools were examined, leading us to…

This article is written from the perspective of a practising headteacher in the context of the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers and addresses the issue of how such training might be appropriated. It seeks to inquire analytically and critically into the bias of the programme, with a special interest in the topic of personal growth and…

Educational leadership has been seen by many as one of the most important factors in school improvement and effectiveness and is about providing a culture within which teaching and learning will prosper. The training of leaders has therefore become of paramount importance. There is a wealth of training in the UK for teachers in leadership roles,…