Global Perspectives on Successful School Principals

This book presents successful principals’ values, practices and qualities observed in nine countries and across different cultural contexts. The work reports evidence about successful school leadership along with indications of how they navigate the complex layers of influences on schools, teachers and students in building and sustaining success. This is mostly qualitative case study evidence resulting from the 20-year ongoing International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), the largest and longest-running mixed-method qualitative research project in the world about successful principalship. The book includes individual reviews of the case studies conducted in individual countries (e.g., UK, US, Australia, Spain) as well as an overarching meta-synthesis of the research evidence across all countries.
It addresses four broad questions:
- How was principal leadership “success” defined in each of the countries and cases?
- What leadership practices were used by successful principals to achieve and sustain success?
- What were the personal qualities of successful principals in different organizational and national contexts?
- How did the enactment of successful leadership practices vary over time and across contexts?
The book appeals to a wide audience, such as university faculty and graduate students in educational leadership programs; school administrators; school middle managers, and policymakers.

Christopher Day is the founder of the twenty-five strong country International Successful School Principalship (ISSPP) research network (2001- ). He is Professor of Education in the School of Education, University of Nottingham, UK and Chair Professor, Beijing Normal University, China, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). He has worked as a teacher, lecturer, and Schools’ Adviser. His interests, research and publications focus upon teacher professionalism, teachers' work, lives and effectiveness; successful school leadership in high needs communities; school-university partnerships; and system change. His current research projects focus on i) Successful school leadership; ii) System Leadership: policy making and management in disruptive times, and iii) Chair-principal relationships in new public governance. Recent book publications include Teacher Professionalism during the Pandemic: care, courage and resilience (2024); School-University Partnerships in Action: the promise of Change (2021), and Successful School Leadership (2020).
Kenneth Leithwood is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Honorary Professor at the University College London, UK, and Nottingham University, UK. He is the 2012 recipient of UCEA’s Roald F. Campbell Lifetime Achievement Award and has been ranked 7th in Canada and 70th in the world by research.com’s 2022 Ranking of the Top 1000 Scientists in the area of Social Sciences and Humanities. Recent bibliometric studies rank him either the first or second most highly cited author in the field of educational leadership and administration. His most recent books include Leadership Development on a Large Scale: Lessons for Long-term Success (2018) and How School Leaders Contribute to Student Success (2017).
Jingping Sun is an Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy and Technology Studies at the College of Education, University of Alabama, USA. Her research is about educational leadership, policy evaluation and improvement, and research synthesis. Her policy experience through her work at the Ontario Ministry of Education in Canada before joining the faculty at the University of Alabama was mainly about large-scale development of school and district leaders. She has published in top-tier journals in educational leadership, including several papers in the leading journal, Educational Administration Quarterly.