School leadership research literature has a large number of widely used constructs. Could fewer constructs bring more clarity? This study evaluates construct content validity, defined as the extent to which a measure's items reflect a theoretical content domain, in school leadership literature. To do so, we reviewed 29 articles that used Teaching…

Collective teacher innovativeness has emerged as a recent topic of interest in both international policy documents and scholarly research. However, only a few studies have focused on the factors that enable collective teacher innovativeness, particularly in terms of revealing whether and to what extent school leadership might influence this…

We combined network analysis and meta-analysis to systematically review the literature on the Teaching and Learning International Survey, focusing on the interplay between leadership practices and school-level conditions. Our initial network analysis utilized 83 nodes (variables in the reviewed studies) and 214 ties (variable associations),…

Research evidence regarding the relative effects of instructional leadership and distributed leadership on teacher job satisfaction and self-efficacy is limited; it is even less evidential when the indirect effects of mediation variables between school leadership and teacher outcomes, including supportive school culture and teacher collaboration,…

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…

Most research into emotional labour is focussed on front-line service staff and health professionals, in short-term interactions. Little exists exploring the emotional labour involved in repeated on-going interactions by educational leaders with key stakeholders. This study explored the relationships between emotional demands, three emotional…

This article has three aims: first, it examines the notion of evidence-informed practice and its benefits, as well as recent educational policy designed to promote schools' use of evidence. Second, it examines four distinct but overlapping and interdependent factors that school leaders need to consider if they wish to establish evidence-informed…

In this article we examine the mentoring program for novice headteachers and what they perceive as its purposes, as well as the constraints to successfully implementing it in Malaysian schools. Using a survey research design we analysed responses from 200 newly appointed headteachers from two state departments of education, and interviewed six…

This article presents research undertaken with female headteachers in UK primary schools and explores several influential discourses in relation to female headteachers' identities. It considers themes inherent in women's narratives as they reflect upon their professional lives and discusses various identities inhabited by female leaders which…

Distributed leadership is a dynamic process and reciprocal interaction of the leader, the subordinates and the situation. This research was inspired by the theoretical framework of Spillane in order to contextualize distributed leadership and compare the variations using the Teaching and Learning International Survey 2013 data. The two-level…

This study seeks to confirm if internal audit, a corporate control process, is functioning effectively in Australian public universities. The study draws on agency theory, published literature and best-practice guidelines to develop an internal audit evaluation framework. A survey instrument is thereafter developed from the framework and used as a…

This paper examines the preparation of school principals in Malaysia, and the aspiration of the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025 to ensure high-performing school leaders in every school. It reports on the principal preparatory programme, the National Professional Qualification for Educational Leaders, which is mandatory to those who aspire…

This study tested the role of enabling school structures, collegial trust and academic emphasis in the development of professional learning communities (PLCs) in a low-income school district. The empirical study was based upon the perceptions of teachers and principals as provided by survey responses (N = 67 schools). While enabling school…