In nation states worldwide, many governments face numerous challenges to provide quality education for increasingly diverse students amidst persistent teacher shortages, intense technology advances, lingering effects from the COVID-19 pandemic, externalized evaluation pressures, and—in some nation states—economic shortfalls and war. Principals must navigate and mediate these rapid, complex changes and influences as they lead schools to achieve and sustain success.
Much of the research on principals have resulted in dominant leadership models (e.g. instructional leadership from Edmonds, 1979; transformational leadership from Leithwood and Jantzi, 1999; distributed leadership from Spillane, 2005; and transformative leadership from Shields, 2010). However, empirical evidence from the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) (e.g. Day et al., 2024) and an increasing body of leadership studies (e.g. Leithwood, 2023) shows that successful principals draw on a wide array of different practices and enact their highly complex roles in ways that respond to, but are not dictated by, challenges and opportunities in the policy, social, cultural and economic contexts of their schools. It is no longer enough to use generalized leadership models to conceptualize and understand what successful leaders actually do to enable all their students to enjoy high-quality academic and social learning and master the knowledge and skills that they need to succeed in later life. Thus, the ISSPP research has moved into a new phase that seeks to use well-grounded theoretical lenses to explain educational leadership in ways that inform, and are informed by, empirical evidence from a variety of contexts and through this, advance the field of educational leadership which has long been criticized for being undertheorized.
In seeking to answer the urgent issues of defining how success is achieved and sustained in schools, researchers/authors of papers in this special issue examine school leadership through the lens of ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) which theorizes individual human practices and development within the context of various dynamically interacting layers of social and ecological systems and the related lens of complexity theory (e.g. Byrne and Callaghan, 2014; Morrison, 2011) which theorizes how interconnected social and ecological systems function and evolve together. Informed by these theories, ISSPP seeks to capture the processes and actions in which school organizations operate, develop, and thrive in an increasingly unpredictable, globalized world. Papers in this special issue present theoretically grounded empirical studies of principal leadership contributions to school success with explicit attention to schools as part of interconnected social and ecological systems in Australia, Sweden, Scotland, Spain, and Japan.
The new phase of ISSPP asks the following new research questions.
How appropriate is complexity theory to furthering understandings of successful school leadership, and how will such understandings advance the application of complexity theory in social and comparative research in education?
To what extent, and in what ways, do diverse socioeconomic, cultural, political systems, and professional contexts at different levels of the education system influence how schools operate to bring about valued educational outcomes, especially those serving high need communities?
To what extent, and in what ways, is “success” in schools perceived and measured similarly and/or differently within and across different countries?
What are the key enablers and constraints for achieving school “success” in different contexts within and across different countries?
How do different key stakeholders within and outside the school community and at different levels of the education system define successful school leadership practices? What similarities and differences can be identified within and across different countries?
What similarities and differences can be identified in the values, beliefs, and behaviors of successful school principals across different schools in the same country, and across national cultures and policy contexts?
To answer these questions, we utilize a comparative, mixed methods design with a variety of data sources to bring multiple perspectives to bear in the inquiry and to answer the research questions. Sampling features principals who lead successful schools in their communities defined by improved academic outcomes since the beginning of the principal's tenure as well as school reputation in the district/municipality and community. Data sources within each case study include semi-structured qualitative interviews with the district/municipality, governors, principal, teachers, parents, and students, and a whole-school teacher survey. The comparative analysis of these data sources within and across different schools and countries enables trustworthiness and enhances rigor.
With our empirical findings of principal leadership contributions to school success and principal leadership interactions with the context of interconnected social and ecological systems from local communities and districts/municipalities to state/nation state and transnational policies and evolutions, we seek to reframe research on successful school principalship and impact the broader educational leadership field. Thinking in this way signals a paradigm shift from a fragmented, reductionist perspective and from a diverse range of sociocultural perspectives, towards an “holistic, connectionist and integrationist view of the individual and the environment” (Youngblood, 1997, p. 34) which embraces a systems oriented, ecological approach to investigating the meaning, forms, and impact of principal leadership on education outcomes, student wellbeing and quality of life.
Structure and description of articles in the special issue
The first paper from Spain, “Between scylla and charybdis: navigating the governance regime to sustain school success” by Fernández-Núñez and López-Yáñez (2026), explores the way leadership unfolds in the different governance bodies of a Spanish secondary school in relation to macro governance for education that is set by law and common to all schools. As a complex, adaptive system, Migracions Secondary introduced meaningful adaptations in its functional structure to respond to its environment of high complexity. By analyzing such adaptations and its sometimes-conflicting interactions with the Spanish school macro-system, the paper extends the ISSPP knowledge base in terms of the interaction between leadership configurations and the governance school processes and structures.
The macro-micro analysis continues in the second paper, “Successful school leadership in Scotland: a journey to sustainable improvement” by Constantinides (2026), beginning with a discussion of systemic reforms in Scotland that feature a complex agenda aimed at addressing achievement gaps between students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and their more advantaged peers. The complex nature of the achievement challenges and the persistent gap between policy and practice require school leaders to navigate the tensions that arise within the educational environment in which they work, requiring a cultural shift across levels, and most importantly, at the micro level of principal leadership in schools.
The third paper, “A case study of successful leadership by an elementary school principal in Japan” by Yada et al. (2026), considers the macro, micro and exo-system influences and interactions as well as leadership navigations of complex, rapidly changing dynamics within them. To meet the deeply embedded equity challenge in education, principals are expected to provide leadership that unites the efforts of teachers in schools and promotes teachers' professional growth. Through the lens of ecological systems theory, the successful case study principal was found to be most active in the microsystem dimension where students learn in the school. Since the education administration in Japan as a macrosystem is centralized, it is important for principals to achieve better educational outcomes in line with the direction of the national curriculum and other education policies. At the same time, the principal mediated the needs of students and broader influences and changes at the exo-and meso levels to attain and sustain school success.
The Australian researchers (Gurr et al., 2026) explore the nexus among context, leadership, and school success in their paper “Context, leadership and school success: Australian suburban, rural and remote cases from the ISSPP.” The paper is based on investigations of three cases that are of different types and in different locations: one suburban Catholic primary school in Melbourne, one rural school in Victor and one remote school in the Northern Territory. Findings are illustrated with a visual that describes several contextual forces surrounding and interacting with these schools (e.g. political, system, economic, socio-cultural, and technological) and how leadership actions mediate the contextual influences to build structures, cultures, and networks that improve teaching and learning as well as a wide range of student and school outcomes. The model developed from the case studies illustrates a systems and complexity view (Morrison, 2011) that supports the ISSPP's current endeavor to develop a new conceptual framing for research on successful leadership.
In “Working together towards school success in a rural school context: ‘It works well but we are not satisfied’,” Grimm et al. (2026) use ecological system theory and complexity theory to discuss how success is understood in a rural school and community in Sweden. Based on an understanding of schools as ecological systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), they interviewed the principal and a range of stakeholders (including teachers, pupils and families) to explore how mutual and diverse understandings of success are embedded in the case study school. They argue that by developing leadership agencies on various levels in the school system and promoting interactions and communication around core values, school leaders support student learning (Biesta and Tedder, 2007; Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Johansson and Ärlestig, 2022). In the paper, the authors have also considered macro and micro democratic education values (Begley and Johansson, 2003), policy and governance, as well as the rural community members' perspectives on success. These insights contribute to understanding of the school principal's efforts to meet policy objectives and enhance students' learning and well-being.
As is typical of change in a long-standing project like ISSPP, we acknowledge that some research teams in the network are further than others in terms of the new phase theorizing educational leadership and utilizing the new comparative, mixed methodology. The special issue concludes with a commentary paper by Sun and Day regarding how the new theoretical positioning and methodology of ISSPP have informed research outlined in the five papers. In closing as co-editors and co-leaders of the successful principal study, we argue that our theoretical positioning of ecological systems theory and complexity theory enable us to explore more nuanced comparisons. By understanding leadership through robust comparison within ISSPP, we seek to consider and more deeply understand the dynamic interplay between systems and the leadership role to mediate and address current issues in education. Our intentions are to demonstrate how a theoretical and conceptual strength on school leadership research helps us to advance the field and to address issues around education in a social ecology for successful school leadership.
