Seven strong claims about
successful school leadership
Introduction
This is a summary of the key findings of a review of literature undertaken by the
authors as a point of departure for a large-scale empirical study organised around
what we refer to as ‘strong claims’ about successful school leadership. These claims
are not all strong in quite the same way, as we shall explain, but they all find support
in varying amounts of quite robust empirical evidence, the first two having attracted
the largest amount of such evidence. Those in leadership roles have a tremendous
responsibility to get it right. Fortunately, we know a great deal about what getting
it right means. The purpose of this paper is to provide a synopsis of this knowledge.
Seven strong claims
1. School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an influence
on pupil learning.
2. Almost all successful leaders draw on the same repertoire of basic
leadership practices.
3. The ways in which leaders apply these basic leadership practices – not
the practices themselves – demonstrate responsiveness to, rather than
dictation by, the contexts in which they work.
4. School leaders improve teaching and learning indirectly and most
powerfully through their influence on staff motivation, commitment
and working conditions.
5. School leadership has a greater influence on schools and students when
it is widely distributed.
6. Some patterns of distribution are more effective than others.
7. A small handful of personal traits explains
Claim 1: School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an
infl uence on pupil learning
This claim will be considered controversial by some. We could have claimed simply that school leadership
has a signifi cant effect on pupil learning, but our choice of wording captures the comparative amount
of (direct and indirect) infl uence exercised by successful school leaders. Leadership acts as a catalyst
without which other good things are quite unlikely to happen. Five sources of evidence justify this claim.
While the middle three sources we identify are quite compelling, it is the fi rst and fi fth sources that place
leadership in contention with instruction.
Five sources of evidence
1. The fi rst justifi cation for this claim is based upon primarily qualitative case study evidence. Studies
providing this type of evidence are typically conducted in exceptional school settings.1 Such settings
are believed to contribute to pupil learning and achievement that is signifi cantly above or below
normal expectations (defi ned, for example, by research on effective schools based on comparing
value-added similarities and differences among high and low performing schools). Studies of this
type usually report very large leadership effects, not only on pupil learning but on an array of school
conditions as well.2 What is lacking in this evidence, however, is external validity or generalisability.
2. The second type of evidence about leadership effects is from large-scale quantitative studies of
overall leader effects. Evidence of this type reported between 1 0 and 1 (approximately four
dozen studies across all types of school) has been reviewed in several papers by Hallinger and
Heck.3 These reviews conclude that the combined direct and indirect effects of school leadership
on pupil outcomes are small but educationally signifi cant. While leadership explains only fi ve
to seven per cent of the difference in pupil learning and achievement across schools (not to
be confused with the typically very large differences among pupils within schools), this difference
is actually about one-quarter of the total difference across schools (12 to 20 per cent) explained by
all school-level variables, after controlling for pupil intake or background factors.4 The quantitative
school effectiveness studies providing much of this data indicate that classroom factors explain
more than one-third of the variation in pupil achievement.
3. A third type of research about leadership effects is, like the second type, large scale and quantitative
in nature. However, instead of examining overall leadership effects, it enquires about the effects
of specifi c leadership practices. A recent meta-analysis,5 for example, identifi ed 21 leadership
responsibilities and calculated an average correlation between each one and the measures of pupil
achievement used in the original studies. From this data, estimates were made of the effects on
pupil test scores. The authors concluded that a 10 percentile point increase in pupil test scores
would result from the work of an average headteacher who improved her demonstrated
abilities in all 21 responsibilities.
4. A fourth source of evidence has explored leadership effects on pupil engagement. In addition to being
an important variable in its own right, some evidence suggests that school engagement is a strong
predictor of pupil achievement. At least 10 mostly recent large-scale, quantitative, similarly designed
studies in Australia and North America have concluded that the effects of transformational school
leadership on pupil engagement are significantly positive.
5. The leadership succession research indicates that unplanned headteacher succession is one of
the most common sources of schools’ failure to progress, in spite of what teachers might do.
These studies demonstrate the devastating effects of unplanned headteacher succession, especially
on initiatives intended to increase pupil achievement. The appointment and retention of a new
headteacher is emerging from the evidence as one of the most important strategies for turning
around struggling schools or schools in special measures.
Our conclusion from this evidence as a whole is that leadership has very significant effects on the quality
of school organisation and on pupil learning. As far as we are aware, there is not a single documented
case of a school successfully turning around its pupil achievement trajectory in the absence of
talented leadership. One explanation for this is that leadership serves as a catalyst for unleashing the
potential capacities that already exist in the organisation.
Claim 2: Almost all successful leaders draw on the same repertoire of
basic leadership practices
This claim emerges from recent research initiatives, and we believe that its implications for leadership
development have not yet been fully grasped. The basic assumptions underlying the claim are that
(a) the central task for leadership is to help improve employee performance; and (b) such
performance is a function of employees’ beliefs, values, motivations, skills and knowledge and
the conditions in which they work. Successful school leadership, therefore, will include practices
helpful in addressing each of these inner and observable dimensions of performance – particularly in
relation to teachers, whose performance is central to what pupils learn.
Recent syntheses of evidence collected in both school and non-school contexts provide considerable
evidence about four sets of leadership qualities and practices in different contexts that accomplish
this goal.10 We have organised these core practices into four categories: building vision and setting
directions; understanding and developing people; redesigning the organisation; and managing the
teaching and learning programme. Each includes more specifi c sub-sets of practices: 14 in total. To
illustrate how widespread is the evidence in their support, we have compared each set of practices to
a widely known taxonomy of managerial behaviours developed by Yukl11 through a comprehensive
synthesis of research conducted in non-school contexts.
• Building vision and setting directions. This category of practices carries the bulk of the effort to
motivate leaders’ colleagues. It is about the establishment of shared purpose as a basic stimulant
for one’s work. The more specifi c practices in this category are building a shared vision, fostering
the acceptance of group goals and demonstrating high-performance expectations.12 These specifi c
practices refl ect, but also add to, three functions in Yukl’s managerial taxonomy: motivating and
inspiring, clarifying roles and objectives, and planning and organising.
• Understanding and developing people. While practices in this category make a signifi cant
contribution to motivation, their primary aim is building not only the knowledge and skills that
teachers and other staff need in order to accomplish organisational goals but also the dispositions
(commitment, capacity and resilience) to persist in applying the knowledge and skills. The more
specifi c practices in this category are providing individualised support and consideration, fostering
intellectual stimulation, and modelling appropriate values and behaviours.13 These specifi c practices
not only refl ect managerial behaviours in Yukl’s taxonomy (supporting, developing and mentoring,
recognising, and rewarding) but, as more recent research has demonstrated, are central to the ways
in which successful leaders integrate the functional and the personal.
• Redesigning the organisation. The specific practices included in this category are concerned
with establishing work conditions which, for example, allow teachers to make the most of their
motivations, commitments and capacities. School leadership practices explain significant variations
in teachers’ beliefs about and responses to their working conditions.14 Specific practices are
building collaborative cultures, restructuring [and reculturing] … the organisation, building
productive relations with parents and the community, and connecting the school to its wider
environment.15 Comparable practices in Yukl’s managerial taxonomy include managing conflict and
team building, delegating, consulting, and networking.
• Managing the teaching and learning programme. As with Redesigning the organisation, the
specific practices included in this category aim to create productive working conditions for teachers,
in this case by fostering organisational stability and strengthening the school’s infrastructure. Specific
practices are staffing the teaching programme, providing teaching support, monitoring school
activity and buffering staff against distractions from their work.16 Yukl’s taxonomy includes
monitoring as a key part of successful leaders’ behaviours.
These four categories of leadership practices, and the 14 more specific sets of behaviours they encompass,
capture the results of a large and robust body of evidence about what successful leaders do. Leaders do
not do all of these things all of the time, of course (you don’t have to create a shared vision every day),
and the way they go about each set of practices will certainly vary by context, as we discuss in the next
section. That said, the core practices provide a powerful new source of guidance for practising leaders,
as well as a framework for initial and continuing leadership development.
Claim 3: The ways in which leaders apply these leadership practices
– not the practices themselves – demonstrate responsiveness to, rather
than dictation by, the contexts in which they work
Much has been written about the high degree of sensitivity successful leaders bring to the contexts in
which they work. Some would go so far as to claim that ‘context is everything’. However, based
on our review of the evidence, this refl ects a superfi cial view of what successful leaders do.
Without doubt, successful leaders are sensitive to context, but this does not mean they use qualitatively
different practices in every different context. It means, rather, that they apply contextually sensitive
combinations of the basic leadership practices described above. By way of example, consider the
leadership of schools in special measures during each stage of being turned around. Beginning at the
end of a period of declining performance, these stages are typically characterised, in both corporate
and school literature,17 as early turnaround (or crisis stabilisation) and late turnaround (or achieving
and sustaining success). Evidence suggests differences in the application of each of our four core sets of
successful leadership practices.
• Building vision and setting directions. This category is particularly important for turnaround
school leaders at the early crisis stabilisation stage, but the context requires enactment of these
practices with a sense of urgency, quickly developing clear, short-term priorities.1 At the late
turnaround stage, much more involvement of staff is necessary in crafting and revising the
school’s direction, so that ownership of the direction becomes widespread, deeply held and
relatively resistant to the vagaries of future leadership succession.
• Understanding and developing people. This category of practices is essential in all stages of
school turnarounds, according to evidence from both US and UK contexts.1 Although this evidence is
not yet suffi ciently fi ne-grained to inform us about how these practices are enacted, it is consistent
in highlighting its importance in all contexts.
• Redesigning the organisation. These practices are quite central to the work of turnaround leaders.
For example, transition from early to later turnaround stages depends on organisational reculturing.20
However, much of what leaders do in the early stage of the turnaround process entails restructuring
to improve the quality of communication throughout the organisation and setting the stage for the
development of new cultural norms related to performance and the more distributed forms of leadership
required to achieve and sustain high levels of performance.
• Managing the teaching and learning programme. All the practices within this category have
been associated with successful turnaround leadership but their enactments change over time. For
example, the flexibility leaders need in order to recruit staff with the dispositions and capacities
required to begin the turnaround process often means negotiating for special circumstances with
local authorities and unions.22 Ongoing staffing of the school at the later turnaround stage, however,
cannot be sustained outside the framework of established policies and regulations.
Additional evidence for the enactment of these basic successful leadership practices in contextually
sensitive forms can now be found in relation both to highly accountable policy contexts and to the
contexts found in schools serving highly diverse student populations.23
Claim 4: School leaders improve teaching and learning indirectly
and most powerfully through their infl uence on staff motivation,
commitment and working conditions
As we pointed out in relation to Claim 2, a key task for leadership, if it is to infl uence pupil learning and
achievement, is to improve staff performance. Such performance, we also claimed, is a function of staff
members’ motivations, commitments, capacities (skills and knowledge) and the conditions in which they
work. Considerable emphasis has recently been placed on school leaders’ contributions to building staff
capacity in particular. This emphasis is refl ected, for example, in the popularity in many countries of the
term ‘instructional leadership’ and in fl edgling efforts to discover the curriculum content knowledge that
successful school leaders should possess.24
There is, however, very little evidence that most school leaders build staff capacity in curriculum content
knowledge, or at any rate that they do so directly and by themselves. Indeed, to suggest they should is, in
our view, to advocate, yet again, an ‘heroic’ model of school leadership – one based on content knowledge
rather than on charisma, as in the past. Such heroic aspirations do more to discourage potential candidates
from applying for leadership jobs than they do to improve the quality of incumbent leadership.
Our review suggested that, while school leaders made modest direct contributions to staff
capacities, they had quite strong and positive infl uences on staff members’ motivations,
commitments and beliefs about the supportiveness of their working conditions. The nature
of the evidence is illustrated by the results of a recent study25 carried out across England.
Based on a national sample of teacher survey responses, the study enquired about the effects of most
of the basic or core leadership practices described above, as enacted by headteachers, on teachers’
implementation of the Primary Strategies (originally the National Literacy Strategy and National Numeracy
Strategy) and the subsequent effects of such implementation on pupil learning and achievement.
Figure 1 is a simplifi ed (number-free) model of the sort typically used to represent results of the kind
of complex statistical analyses used in this study.26 Such analyses are designed to test the direction and
strength of relationships among variables in a model, as well as the amount of variation in certain
variables that can explained by other variables.
The model indicates that the more headteachers enacted the core leadership practices described earlier,
the greater was their influence on teachers’ capacities, motivation and beliefs about the supportiveness
of their working conditions. In turn these capacities, motivations and beliefs had a significant influence
on classroom practices, although in this study such practices seemed unrelated to pupil learning and
achievement. As Figure 1 indicates, the influence of leadership practices was strongest on teachers’
beliefs about working conditions, followed by their motivation to implement the Primary
Strategies and then by their views of their preparedness to implement those strategies. Figure 1
also suggests that the strongest direct contribution to altered classroom practices was teachers’ beliefs
about their capacity to implement the strategies. Thus it is clearly important to develop teachers’
capacities, although school leaders, in this study, have less influence on this dimension of teachers’
performance than they do on the motivation and working conditions dimensions.
These results have been replicated most recently in separate very large English and American studies.27
Further weight is added to these results by a recent synthesis of evidence about the emotions that shape
teachers’ motivations (levels of commitment, sense of efficacy, morale, job satisfaction, stress and the
like) and the effects on their pupils’ learning. This evidence indicates strong effects of teachers’ emotions
on their practices, and strong effects of leadership practices on those emotions. The recent four-year
mixed-methods national study28 of variations in the work, lives and effectiveness of teachers in
English schools confirms the importance of leadership – alongside other mediating influences
– to teachers’ commitment, resilience and effectiveness, and the key role of emotional
understanding in successful leadership.
In the face of such evidence, the position most often advocated is that leaders ought to make greater
direct contributions to staff capacities, and that this is a challenge to be addressed in the future.
Claim 5: School leadership has a greater infl uence on schools and
pupils when it is widely distributed
Despite the popularity of this claim, evidence in its support is less extensive and in some cases less
direct than that in support of the previous claims. Nevertheless, it is quite compelling. We begin with
an illustration of this evidence using a recent study2 designed in much the same way as the one used to
illustrate Claim 4. Results of this study are summarised in Figure 2, a path analysis model (with numbers
included this time) representing the strength of relationships among the same variables (except altered
teacher practices) considered in the study illustrating Claim 4. The leadership measured in this case
was not provided exclusively by headteachers: we asked about the leadership provided by many
possible sources – individual teachers, staff teams, parents, central offi ce staff, students and
vice-principals – as well as the principal or headteacher. ‘Total leadership’ refers to the combined
infl uence of leadership from all sources.
Figure 2 indicates the following.
• There are signifi cant relationships between total leadership and the three dimensions of
staff performance.
• The strongest relationships are with teachers’ perceived working conditions.
• The weakest relationships are with teacher motivation and commitment.
• The relationship between total leadership and teachers’ capacity is much stronger than the relationship
(illustrated in Figure 1) between the headteacher’s leadership alone and teachers’ capacity.
The most signifi cant results of this study for our purposes, however, were the indirect effects of total
leadership on student learning and achievement, through its direct effects on the three dimensions of
staff performance. Total leadership accounted for a quite signifi cant 27 per cent of the variation
in student achievement across schools. This is a much higher proportion of explained variation
(two to three times higher) than is typically reported in studies of individual headteacher effects.
In addition to this direct evidence about the effects of distributed leadership, less direct evidence in
support of this claim can be found in research on formal leadership succession, school improvement
initiatives, processes used to successfully turn around low-performing schools, and the movement
toward fl atter organisational structures and team problem-solving.
Claim 6: Some patterns of distribution are more effective than others
This claim grows directly from evidence about the superiority, in most but not all contexts, of distributed
rather than focused (single-person) leadership. Research on a sample of 110 schools demonstrated that
there are relationships between the use of different patterns of leadership distribution and levels
of value-added student achievement.
• Schools with the highest levels of student achievement attributed this to relatively high levels of
infl uence from all sources of leadership.
• Schools with the lowest levels of student achievement attributed this to low levels of infl uence
from all sources of leadership.
• Schools with the highest levels, as compared with those in the lowest levels, of student achievement
differed most in their ratings of the infl uence of school teams, parents and students.
• Headteachers were rated as having the greatest (positive and negative) infl uence in all schools.
This evidence is at least consistent with claims about the ineffectiveness of laissez-faire forms
of leadership.30 It also refl ects earlier fi ndings about power as a relatively unlimited resource in
organisations.31 There is no loss of power and infl uence on the part of headteachers when, for
example, the power and infl uence of many others in the school increase.
While the evidence strengthens the case that some leadership distribution patterns are more helpful
than others, it sheds little light on the range of patterns that actually exists in schools and, most
importantly, the relative effects of these patterns on the quality of teaching, learning and pupil
achievement. Evidence on these key questions is extremely limited, and efforts to fi ll this gap represent
the advancing edge of current leadership research. A number of theorists have proposed leadership
patterns that they believe capture the range currently found in schools: for example, additive patterns
refl ecting unco-ordinated patterns of practice by many people in an organisation, as compared with
parallel patterns that refl ect greater co-ordination.32 A recent report on evidence from private sector
organisations33 begins to support the sensible assertion that more co-ordinated patterns of leadership
practice are associated with more benefi cial organisational outcomes. No comparable evidence has
yet been reported in schools.
Claim 7: A small handful of personal traits explains a high proportion
of the variation in leadership effectiveness
Why are some leaders more expert than others? Why do some people seem to develop leadership
capacities to higher levels and more quickly than others? These important questions direct our focus
to what is known about successful leaders’ personal traits, dispositions, personality characteristics and
the like. A substantial body of research conducted outside schools provides a reasonably comprehensive
answer to these questions as it applies to private sector leaders.34 However, within schools the evidence
is less comprehensive. Little research has focused on personality characteristics or intelligence, though
there have been signifi cant contributions concerning cognitive processes35 and leaders’ values.36
One recent American study37 on school leaders’ confi dence or sense of collective effi cacy illustrates the
potential value of future research about headteacher traits. Using a database comparable to the ones
summarised in Figure 2 and noted under Claim 6, this study found that some characteristics of school
districts (for example, a clear focus on pupil learning and achievement and a commitment to data-based
decision-making) had a signifi cant infl uence on school leaders’ sense of how well they were doing their
jobs. This sense of effi cacy in turn shaped the nature of headteachers’ leadership practices; highlighted
the relationship between these practices and such things as decision-making processes in their schools;
and had an indirect but signifi cant infl uence on pupils’ learning and achievement.
Although not setting out to be research on leader traits, recent studies of leaders’ efforts to improve
low-performing schools3 have begun to replicate evidence from private sector research. This evidence
warrants the claim that, at least under challenging circumstances, the most successful school leaders
are open-minded and ready to learn from others. They are also fl exible rather than dogmatic
in their thinking within a system of core values, persistent (eg in pursuit of high expectations of
staff motivation, commitment, learning and achievement for all), resilient and optimistic. Such
traits help explain why successful leaders facing daunting conditions are often able to push forward
when there is little reason to expect progress.
CONCLUSION
A recent publication3 sponsored by Division A of the American Educational Research Association (the
largest association of its kind in the world, with many international members) claimed that research on
school leadership has generated few robust claims. The main reason cited for this gap in our knowledge
was a lack of programmatic research; a paucity of accumulated evidence from both small- and large-scale
studies, the use of a variety of research designs, and failure to provide evidence in suffi cient amounts
and of suffi cient quality to serve as powerful guides to policy and practice. We have no quarrel with
this assertion.
This assertion, however, should not be taken to mean that we know nothing of importance about
successful school leadership. There are some quite important things that we do know, and claims that
we can now make with some confi dence. Not taking pains to capture what we know not only risks
squandering the practical insights such evidence can provide; it also reduces the likelihood that future
leadership research will build cumulatively on what we already know. Failure to build on this would be
a huge waste of scarce resources.
This executive summary has presented, in the form of seven strong claims, the most important results
of previous school-leadership research. We explore these claims in more detail in our full review of
the literature.40 This literature review, the jumping-off point for a large-scale, mixed-methods empirical
study, will extend the number of robust claims that we can legitimately make about successful
leadership in a range of schools. In so doing, it will signifi cantly increase the quality and quantity
of evidence of what successful school leadership means in practice.
