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.