Voices from International Confederation of Principals

The unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated many of the pre-existing challenges and inequalities in education provision worldwide, including the hundreds of millions of children who were not in school before the pandemic and those not learning while in school (Save the Children, 2021). When reconsidering how the futures of education can fulfil the learning potential of children in schools, we must understand why leadership comes first .   Drawing on what we have learned from real leaders in real primary and secondary schools globally, I wanted to share four strong research-informed claims about successful school leadership: Research Claim 1 : There are differences in culture between schools and between countries, but challenges are broadly the same. One of the key challenges facing school leaders in many countries across the world is to enact incoherent, disjointed, and at times contradictory external policy initiatives successfully. Policy shifts...

  The wellbeing of school principals has been the study of Prof. Phil Riley and others for a number of years. Statistics coming out of these studies regularly indicate that school principals experience higher workplace demands, higher burnout, higher stress symptoms, more irregular sleeping patterns, higher depressive symptoms, etc. than the general population. Adam Fraser in his 2018 article ‘It’s a lonely job: how can we help stressed-out principals?’ indicated that principals “have more than 12 different and distinct areas of work, many of which require different skill sets as well as emotional agility in order to cope while moving from one highly stressful task to another”. He further states that “the risk-adverse nature of our society means they (school principals) have more reporting and compliance to do. This ensures that standards are met, that principals are delivering on expectations of students, parents, staff, community, the department and even themselves.” In a Mon...