Introduction: Relational leadership for change

In recent decades, research on leadership and change has emphasised the predictive and the normative. Both in Europe, and in the English-speaking countries, most research in the field could be classified as falling into one of two bins: 'school improvement' and 'school effectiveness'. The former examined policy and practice levers that could explain why change happens in some contexts but not in others; the latter focused on the development of better information about the nature of schools that performed better on standardised or national tests. For the most part, neither has focused intensively on issues of leadership, except to include examinations of the head teachers or school principals as a factor in more effective schools, or to examine the ways in which their actions and behaviour can affect the course of an improvement process.