This article reports on the challenges facing public school leadership in southern Thailand, a region destabilized by renewal of a longstanding insurgency. Seeking to implement national educational reforms on shifting social, political and cultural terrain, educators in this region face extraordinary challenges as they reconsider and renegotiate…

This article focuses on assessing the performance of government secondary school headteachers in the context of heads' leadership qualities, instructional behavior, capabilities of interpersonal relationships, professional attitude and managerial abilities. The small-scale survey was carried out in 2006 in district Mianwali, Pakistan. The sample…

Between 1996 and 1998, research commissioned by the Scottish Office Education Department was undertaken on the management of small Scottish primary schools, the results of which were published in this journal (Wilson and McPake, 1998). This article reports the findings from a follow-up study of a sample of 100 schools that participated in the…

This article examines the effects of servant leadership behaviours of primary school principals on teacher job satisfaction. The population of this study is 29 primary schools in Duzce, Turkey. Data were collected from 595 teachers working in primary schools in Duzce province of Turkey. Servant leadership behaviours of principals were determined…

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 reports findings from a study of headteachers and spirituality. It is intended to give some insight into the importance of spiritual experience as a phenomenon which enables leaders to be better resourced internally and find deeper meaning, and to provide evidence of the significance and influence of spiritual experience for…

This article explores several issues about school leaders, career stages and performance. It draws upon various pieces of research, including the longitudinal study of secondary headteachers which began in the early 1980s at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), to raise some key issues about headteachers' careers, the various…

This article adopts "irony" as a frame for understanding some of the consequences of the reform movement in the UK. A distinction is drawn between the ironies that are endemic in all organizations and rooted in ambiguities and dilemmas, and the ironies that specifically flow from the disjunction between central policies and the…

This article explores the alternate ways ethical school leadership in the best interests of students is conceptualized in the educational leadership literature from several foundational perspectives including philosophy, psychology, critical theory and case law. Perspectives which are grounded solely in theory are differentiated from those…

This study, which was sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, was conducted in French-language minority schools in seven Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. Using an open-ended interview guide, 47 principals were asked about the…

The first 100 days of a new senior executive appointment are fraught with multi-faceted challenges that rely on specific leadership approaches for their resolution. The purpose of this article is to (1) explore which leadership issues and initiatives most present themselves in the first 100 days of such an appointment, (2) examine the extent 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…

The purpose of this article is to make the case for a broader perspective on school leadership and school-environment interrelationships and to develop the concept of systemic leadership for schools and the related notion of systemic authorization. The article explores the background to the concept and relevant aspects of the conceptualization,…