The present study is a developmental review that aims to conceptualise, using empirical data, the mediating paths connecting effective school leadership (i.e. transformational leadership and distributed leadership) to teachers' affective and normative organisational commitment. The review is based on empirical studies on teachers' organisational…

Teacher professional learning plays a critical role in education reform by enabling teachers to refine their professional skills and keep up with changing content knowledge, pedagogy, and trends in schooling. This study examines how and under what conditions principal instructional leadership contributes to teachers' professional learning in…

Empirical studies of school leadership in South Asia are limited. This qualitative study examines the ways in which principals in three award-winning community high schools enact leadership practices in their specific contexts in Nepal. The results reveal that the principals used multiple frames of leadership and were proactive towards reforms.…

Schools in Turkey are primarily influenced by the Ministry of National Education ("Milli Egitim Bakanligi") through laws and regulations. Compliance with regulations might be characterised as superficial in many respects and can lead to schools 'decoupling' their espoused structures from the realities of practice. In other words, they…

In this study, I explore how school principals experience transformative learning in relation to leadership development and how these experiences influence their leadership practices and perceptions. Transformative learning is critical for school leaders because it can lead to meaningful learning that qualitatively changes their leadership…

International research has shown that the quality of school leadership and management (SLM) is important for teaching and learning, particularly in schools where there is acute resource deprivation. This article explores the relationship between leadership and academic achievement in South African secondary schools with varying socio-economic…

In 2008 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development presented system leadership (leadership beyond a single institution) as more effective than traditional approaches to public services delivery in responding to the external drivers of globalisation, new technologies and increasing societal complexity. This paper reports the…

Research on educational leadership and management has resulted in the accumulation of increasingly persuasive findings concerning the impact school leadership can have on school performance. Indeed, there is a growing consensus that there exists a generic set of leadership practices (e.g. goal setting, developing people) which must be adapted to…

To what extent can heads use an inclusive values-led approach to school development in the face of pressures from Ofsted and their Local Authority to focus almost exclusively on attainment outcomes? We explore leadership of school improvement in a qualitative study of 10 head teachers in the English county of "Preshire," who worked with…

The paper suggests that multiple deprivation is a concept as yet lacking in substantial theoretical analysis and that its application as a research framing tool in education is relatively recent. As a concept, multiple deprivation suggests a confluence of factors which depress learning and place unique challenges on leadership and which act in…

Multiple deprivation affects a large proportion of schools in South Africa. The past 20 years of democracy have tended to focus on reforming education through curricula revision and a raft of redress-directed interventions, through the application of what we call a broad-brush policy approach. The paper argues that a broad-brush policy application…

This paper reports on evidence from five school principals regarding leadership practices that work in multiple deprived contexts. The South African educational landscape is complex, often described as a cocktail of first and third world institutions. Looking at the schooling system on a continuum, on the one end there are first class schools…

In the context of emigration, immigration, international mobility and globalization, the management contexts of education sites are undergoing deep and sensitive changes making challenging demands on educational leaders. Multiethnic/multicultural schools are emerging as a long-term phenomenon in countries such as Britain against the backdrop of…