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School Leadership & Management

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The impact of school leadership on pupil outcomes

Kenneth Leithwood ;Christopher Day

To cite this Article Leithwood, Kenneth andDay, Christopher(2008) 'The impact of school leadership on pupil outcomes',
School Leadership & Management, 28: 1, 1 — 4
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13632430701799718
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632430701799718

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 School Leadership and Management,
Vol. 28, No. 1, February 2008, pp. 1
4

EDITORIAL

The impact of school leadership on

pupil outcomes
Kenneth Leithwood and Christopher Day

The past 15 years have witnessed a remarkably consistent, worldwide effort by

educational policy-makers to reform schools by holding them more publicly
accountable for improving pupil performance on state or national tests. For school
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leaders, and for those who study what they do, the main consequence of this policy
shift has been considerable pressure to demonstrate the contribution of their work to
such improvement. Curiously, this pressure has not actually emerged from a
pervasive scepticism about the value of leadership; quite the opposite. Indeed, it
would be more accurate to characterise this as a demand to ‘prove’ the widely held
assumption that leadership matters a great deal. We say ‘curiously’ because the
empirical evidence in support of this assumption, while reasonably robust by now,
has been slow to accumulate.
The pervasiveness of the assumption that leadership matters seems much more
likely to have been rooted in what Meindl and his colleagues (e.g. 1985) have termed
‘the romance of leadership’; it offers a simple explanation for some very complex
organisational puzzles. By now, however, we can be reasonably certain that there is
more to it than romance. International examples of original research offering us this
certainty include Leithwood and Jantzi (1999a, 1999b) and Silins and Mulford
(2002). Comprehensive and increasingly systematic reviews of such evidence by
Hallinger and Heck (1996), Marzano et al. (2005) and, most recently, by Robinson
(2007) provide us with considerable confidence that leadership is a critical
explanation for variation across schools in an array of important pupil outcomes.
This special issue of School Leadership and Management includes the first five
papers to emerge at the halfway stage of a large three-year study in England. Begun
in January 2006, this study was commissioned by the Department for Education and
Skills1 in conjunction with the National College of School Leadership. This is a
mixed-methods study conducted by collaborative teams located in several different
universities exploring a series of questions generally concerned with the relationships
between school leadership (in particular that of the headteacher) and pupil
outcomes. Our work aims to build on the accumulation of previous research, in
part by addressing some of its critical limitations. One of these limitations, for
example, is to be found in commonly used measures of the dependent (or outcome)
variable. In almost all leadership effects studies, to date, this measure is either an
annual average or, at best, a change in an annual average performance on some
ISSN 1363-2434 (print)/ISSN 1364-2626 (online)/08/010001-04
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13632430701799718
 2 K. Leithwood and C. Day

outcome measure over several years. Such estimates can be seriously confounded by
pupil cohort and other plausible influences that have nothing to do with schools or
leadership. In response, our research uses pupils’ value-added attainment tests at
national level over a sequential three-year period with the same headteachers in post
as its measure of the dependent variable. Another example of a shortcoming in much
educational leadership research to date has been its limited power to explain how
successful leaders influence pupil outcomes. Knowing that leadership matters but
not how it matters is not of much practical value. Better knowledge of these processes
has much to contribute to both leadership and policy development.
Our study, similar to a large American study also now in mid-stream (Leithwood
et al., 2004), aims to unpack in some detail how the work of successful leaders
contributes, directly and indirectly, both to teachers’ pedagogy and to pupil learning.
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More specifically, by the time our work is completed we will have:

. identified and described variations in effective leadership practice (types, qualities,
strategies and skills);
. determined the reasons for such variation;
. explored the extent to which variations in pupil outcomes are accounted for by
variation in leadership practices;
. identified the primary factors both moderating and mediating leadership effects on
the school organisation and both short- and long-term pupil outcomes;
. clarified the implications of this research for the work of the Department for
Children, Schools and Families, the National College for School Leadership, local
authorities and schools.
The five papers in this special issue are significant, if early, contributions toward
these goals. The first paper (Day, Sammons, Hopkins, Leithwood and Kington)
describes the policy context in which school leaders in England do their work, a
context with arguably the most demanding external accountability pressures on
schools to be found anywhere in the world at this time. Understanding this context is
critical for readers to make sense of our results and to decide just how generalisable
to the locations of their own work they are. This first paper also summarises the
initial framework for our study, identifying the variables and relationships which
helped to frame our questions and data-collection instruments. Finally the paper
provides an overview of our mixed-methods design, explaining how we conceptualise
the relationships between the results of our survey and case-study evidence.
In the second paper (Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins), we summarise the evidence
reviewed in advance of our data-collection activities. This evidence is organised
around ‘seven strong claims’ concerning successful school leadership:
. School leadership is second only to classroom instruction as an influence on pupil
learning.
. Almost all successful leaders draw on the same repertoire of basic leadership
practices.
 School leadership and management 3

. Leaders enact this repertoire of practices in ways that are highly responsive to the
contexts in which they find themselves.
. Leaders improve teaching and learning indirectly and most powerfully through
their influence on staff motivation and working conditions.
. School leadership has a greater influence on schools and pupils when it is widely
distributed.
. Some patterns of leadership distribution are more effective than others.
. A small handful of personal traits explains a high proportion of the variation in
leadership effectiveness.
A portion of our current research consists of further testing some of these claims.
The third paper is by Pamela Sammons, Qing Gu and Palak Mehta. Including a
synopsis of the plan used to select schools for participation in the quantitative arm of
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our study, this paper also summarises initial findings from our efforts to explore the
extent of influence on leadership practices of differences in school achievement
trajectories and family and pupil background variables. This report of some of our
early quantitative evidence is followed in the fourth paper (Penlington, Kington and
Day) by the highlights of our first-year case-study data collected from 20 high-
performing schools. Although we will have much more data of this type by the end of
the study, this paper provides powerful insights into the work of school leaders, which
of their practices are most consequential for schools and pupils, and differences in
how this leadership is distributed within schools. The paper speaks quite directly to
the issue of how successful leaders influence their schools and pupils.
The fifth and final paper (Day, Leithwood and Sammons) offers a relatively
concise overview of what we have learned to date in response to four questions
central to our study. These are questions concerning sustainable leadership practices,
how such practices contribute to school improvement, differences in leadership
practices in response to context, and how leaders productively enact the succession
process.

Notes
1. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has been renamed the Department for
Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).
2. Leithwood et al. (2004).

References
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Leithwood, K. and D. Jantzi. 1999a. The relative effects of principal and teacher sources of
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Leithwood, K., and D. Jantzi. 1999b. Transformational school leadership effects: A replication.
School Effectiveness and School Improvement 10, no. 4: 451
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 4 K. Leithwood and C. Day

Leithwood, K., K. Louis, S. Anderson, and K. Wahlstrom. 2004. How leadership influences student
learning: A review of research for the Learning from Leadership Project. New York: Wallace
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Marzano, R., T. Waters, and B. McNulty. 2005. School leadership that works: From research to results.
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