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By Shane Leaning
I’ve been a leader at almost every level an international school can offer: department leader, senior leader, and eventually executive leader across a large group of schools. Across all those roles, the challenges looked different on the surface but were remarkably similar underneath. Almost every hard problem I faced as a leader was a human one: how to communicate, how to ask someone to do something well, how to handle the everyday interactions that leadership is made of.
In schools, we invest enormous energy in developing teachers through mentoring, coaching and whole systems built around improving classroom practice. Yet when someone moves into a leadership role, we often assume good teaching will translate into effective leadership, and leadership development comes later, if at all. Even then, it can feel disconnected from the real demands of the role.
We’ve been measuring the wrong thing
For a long time, schools have celebrated leaders who can write strategic plans, manage budgets and oversee initiatives: the big-picture operators with a clear strategic vision. But the behaviours with the greatest impact are often less visible: listening well, being present, building trust. Bryk and Schneider’s long-term study of Chicago schools found that schools with high levels of trust between staff, leaders and parents were much more likely to see real gains in learning, while schools where trust was weak saw almost none (Bryk and Schneider, 2002). Leadership is a people discipline, and I think the growing interest in kinder, calmer, more people-centred leadership deserves to be taken seriously for that reason.
Take resourcing versus relational leadership. Viviane Robinson’s research, which the International Curriculum Association draws on heavily in its International Leadership and Management Programme (ILMP), found that how leaders allocate resources had a fairly small effect on student outcomes, while leaders promoting and taking part in their teachers’ professional learning had the largest effect of any leadership practice they studied (Robinson, Lloyd and Rowe, 2008). Being present in teachers’ learning counts for more than how resources are shared out, and I think schools are only partway through adjusting to that.
The other shift I’m pleased to see is that leaders are increasingly expected to know the evidence rather than rely on instinct. Just as a teacher should know their pedagogy, a leader should know what the research says makes leadership effective. For too long leadership has been treated as something you either have or you don’t, and that view is finally losing ground.
One leadership myth we need to retire
If there is a single assumption I would like schools to let go of, it is that staff wellbeing is mainly an individual problem. For years, the instinct when someone struggled was to focus entirely on them: what help do they need, a counsellor, time off? Those things matter, but if the underlying culture doesn’t change, you’re treating symptoms while the cause keeps producing more of the same. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows how much the climate of a team, rather than any one person in it, shapes whether people feel able to ask for help, admit mistakes and speak up (Edmondson, 1999). I think wellbeing works the same way: it’s an organisational issue as much as a personal one, and schools that treat it that way can get ahead of problems instead of constantly reacting to them.
The job of a senior leader is changing fast
Two pressures stand out to me right now. The first is workload. In England, full-time school leaders reported working an average of 56.5 hours a week in the government’s latest survey of the profession (Department for Education, 2025). Many leaders manage that pressure invisibly, staying composed in front of staff while running on empty. We need to talk about this far more openly, for leaders and teachers alike.
The second is AI governance, which I don’t think has been fully recognised yet. Ethics, privacy, intellectual property and data protection have traditionally sat outside educational expertise, and they’re fast becoming everyday concerns for school leaders. Things are changing faster than leaders can build the expertise to govern them well.
At the same time, AI is changing how parents communicate with schools. Complaint letters are more polished and often written in a way that adds friction rather than resolving anything. I know one school that scaled back email as the default channel for parent communication and replaced it with dedicated face-to-face time to talk things through. Protecting human connection on purpose, rather than assuming it will survive by default, is something I think more schools will need to do.
The ripple effect of good leadership is real
When people ask me which school they should go and work for, I always give them the same answer: it depends who is leading it. After classroom teaching, school leadership is the biggest influence within a school on what pupils learn (Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins, 2008), and it shapes everything downstream. So, investing in leadership development is one of the most worthwhile things a school can do, but only if that investment is evidence-informed. Away days and conference trips can feel valuable, but unless they’re grounded in evidence of what drives improvement, their impact is often limited.
What connects all of this is that leadership in international education is becoming more accountable to evidence, more honest about workload and wellbeing, and more deliberate about protecting real connection as more of school life runs through AI. That’s the kind of leadership I want to help schools build.
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