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A demographic time bomb is ticking in many school jurisdictions. Up to 70 per cent of present leaders in the private and public sectors will retire within the next five to ten years as the “baby boomers” move on. While succession planning has become a major initiative in the private sector, leadership succession in education tends to hew to old paths. Where are new educational leaders to come from? How should their succession be orchestrated? The traditional source of succession at the secondary level, the department headship, is no longer an attractive route for many teachers. Many potential leaders do not perceive the role of principal or assistant principal in a positive light. These roles are increasingly being associated with managing the standards/standardization agenda with which many professionals profoundly disagree. While it is premature to declare a leadership crisis in education, it is not too early to call on policy makers to attend to the growing need for succession planning at all levels in education. Based on an examination of change over times in four schools in Ontario, this article addresses issues of leadership succession in education and, more precisely, examines the influence of principals’ succession on the principals themselves and their schools.

A crucial aspect of a school's capacity to promote and sustain change and improvement in student learning is the depth, breadth and endurance of both its formal and informal leadership. Shortages of willing leaders, however, have forced governments around the world to expend a considerable amount of time, effort, and money to fill up the leadership “pipeline” with qualified candidates for leadership positions. This paper aims to address these issues.

This paper uses the examples of school districts in Ontario, Canada, in England and in the eastern United States to look beyond the common practice of merely filling up “pipelines” with credentialed leaders to an examination of the development of leadership “pools” and “reservoirs” of leadership capacity through distributed forms of leadership.

It is found that there has been a subtle but important shift in thinking over the past few years. Where once money spent on leadership recruitment and development was considered a cost, it is now viewed as an investment and as a result some school authorities have shifted focus from “replacement planning” in which specific people are identified to fill certain jobs, to a “succession management” approach which involves building an organization's leadership capacity by identifying, recruiting, and developing a “pool” of high‐potential individuals for both current and future roles.

The paper shows that developing this pool depends in large measure on the “reservoir” of leadership capacity in an organization and perhaps most importantly, the willingness of potential leaders to come forward.

This article aims to discusses the nature and benefits of lateral approaches to educational change, especially in the form of distributed leadership, that treat schools, localities, states, or nations, as “living systems” interconnected by mutual influence.

The paper presents a conceptual discussion of the interrelated ideas of living systems, communities of practice and networks. Research examples from England, North America, and Finland are used to underscore the article's argument.

The article underlines how, within this conception, distributed leadership operates as a network of strong cells organized through cohesive diversity and emergent development rather than mechanical alignment and predictable delivery. However, more deeply and more critically, the chapter also investigates whether, in practice, these lateral strategies are being used to extend democratic public and professional involvement in developing the goals and purposes of education or whether they are being primarily used as motivational devices to re‐energize a dispirited profession into producing more effective and enthusiastic delivery of imposed government performance targets?

The paper provides useful information on developments in distributed leadership.

Since the turn of the new millennia, governments have increasingly moved away from professional models of educational decision-making and turned toward a neoliberal production model in which markets and test scores drive educational decisions. In this “brave new world,” teachers have become “human capital,” and principals, the managers of their productivity rather than leaders of learning. As a result of this changing dynamic, teachers have increasingly turned to teacher unions or federations, and away from local school jurisdictions and governments to protect their salaries, working conditions and professionalism. Principals, in turn, have found themselves in a no-win situation – caught between top-down demands from big governments and local school districts for teacher compliance, and big unions' insistence on fair treatment for all teachers. This chapter, therefore, intends to explore this increasingly fragile role of principals in three international settings, in our rapidly changing world.

This paper aims to serve as an introduction to and overview of this special issue of the Journal of Educational Administration entitled “Building organisational capacity in school education”. The co‐editors have solicited contributions from authors in Wales, Australia, Canada, the USA, England, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

The paper reviews past and contemporary approaches to the issue of capacity building in education and in particular, sustainable capacity building. As well as reviewing key researchers and writers in this field, including their own work, the authors foreshadow and synthesise the other seven papers that make up this special issue.

The paper contends that building capacity in schools and schooling, while no means easy, can be both understood and accomplished. However, caution needs to be exercised because hard‐fought gains in capacity building and sustainability can be quickly eroded under the influence of poor leadership or extraneous changes.

The paper serves as a framework both for the seven papers that follow and more generally for understanding and conceptualising sustainable school capacity building.

The paper performs the function of framing current debates and pressures around sustainable school capacity‐building in an international theoretical and practical context.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake a personal, historical, analytical and interpretive investigation of the evolution of the concept of authentic leadership in educational administration/leadership over a number of decades.

The paper includes the author's reflections on his own journey on the topic as well as an analysis of the contributions of great researchers, theorists and writers since early in the twentieth century but, especially, since the early 1960s.

While there is no coherent body of literature on the development of the concept of authentic leadership, there is a general discernible trend starting with a focus on self (know thyself, to thine own self be true); to considering and defining self in relationships; to accepting that there is a moral force behind notions of self-fulfillment; to recognising that authentic leaders operate in a real post-modern (perhaps post-post modern) world of pressures, paradoxes and ethical challenges. This is often a world of standards, assessment and accountability for performance outcomes.

The paper draws on the author's own research journey and legacy on the topic as well as the contributions of “giants in the field” who have continually pushed the envelope when exploring the topic and closely interrelated topics.