Challenging the orthodoxy of effective school leadership

The research reported in this paper, which collected and compared the perspectives of those who, in addition to principals themselves, arguably possess the closest working knowledge of leadership, i.e. teachers, parents, governors and students, reveals a different, more complex reality of effective headship than previous studies have revealed. It proposes a model of values led contingency leadership which takes into account the realities of successful principalship of schools in changing times, and moves beyond polarized concepts of transactional and transformational leadership.