Reflections on successful school leadership from the International Successful School Principalship Project

Abstract

The 2000s have been described as the golden age of leadership (Leithwood and Day, 2007a, p. 1), yet the topic of leadership remains contentious. Some academics question the concept of leadership itself and the usefulness and relevance of locat-ing leadership in the work of people such as school principals. While acknowledging many of the criticisms, in this chapter we reflect on 14 years of research from the International Successful School Principalship Project,1 and in particular we report on three aspects of this research, two of which are somewhat challenging to current views of school leadership. After describing the project, we discuss the importance of context to successful school leadership and argue that while context is important, there seem to be leadership attributes that are important in most contexts, rather than, as is commonly assumed, leadership being context dependent. We then argue that the idea of heroic leadership needs to be revisited rather than abandoned, and that it needs to be updated to acknowledge the support of many in leading schools: a post-heroic view. Finally, we attempt to define school leadership by describing in some detail one of the models we have developed.