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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.

The purpose of this paper is to use empirical data on new principals to clarify the connection between different succession situations and the challenges their successor principals face.

The study draws on two waves of interview data from a random sample of 16 new elementary school principals in a major urban school district in the USA.

New principals face distinct practice challenges depending on the nature of their successions. The less planned the succession, the less information and knowledge the new principal tends to possess. The more discontinuous the new administration’s trajectory is with the previous administration, the greater the staff resistance that the successor principal tends to face.

Few studies systematically examine how succession situations differ in schools that are in need of transformation vs those in need of stability. This study addresses this gap by illuminating the varied processes of succession and highlighting specific mechanisms that link these processes to different organizational trajectories.

For district officials, this study suggests that principals in unplanned successions need greater support in quickly gathering information about their new schools while principals in discontinuous successions need greater expertise in how to balance trust-building and accountability in their attempts to promote transformational change.

This study’s primary value is its detailed articulation of how certain characteristics of succession situations are associated with specific types of challenges. Only studies at this level of specificity can be effective guides to practitioners and policymakers who are charged with preparing, selecting, and supporting new principals and their schools.

The purpose of this study is to examine principal succession planning and management by analyzing current practices of handling school leader succession in four Georgia school systems.

Looking through the lens of organizational leadership succession theory, the practices of school systems as they experienced changes in school leadership were examined. Participants included superintendents, assistant superintendents, other central office leaders, and principals. A multiple‐case approach was selected with semi‐structured interviews providing the major source of data.

Findings suggest the following: there is a difference in the sense of urgency for the planning and management of the succession of principals; the development of aspiring leaders was identified as a critical component of planning and management of succession; mentoring was an essential practice through the succession process; and reliance on collaborative partnerships with outside organizations was highly valued.

The implications of the study include a call for further research to determine the differences in leader succession planning and management needs related to the varying contexts. In addition, the study implies that building collaborative partnerships with university preparation programs and other external professional development organizations may assist systems in the planning and management of principal succession.

The originality of this study stems from the lack of literature that directly examines the experiences and practices of principal succession. The findings can inform school system leaders of succession planning and management issues and practices that exist in the four systems studied. As leadership becomes more recognized for its impact on student achievement and school performance, it is imperative that succession is managed and planned to ensure sustainability and effectiveness.

The study of succession effects on organizational performance has resulted in findings ambiguous at best. Succession has been found to have positive, negative and neutral impacts on a variety of outcome measures. While most studies have focused on performance outcomes, an alternative research approach is to examine the sense making experience of members of the organization during succession to better understand the process and its impact on participants. The paper reports the personal sense making experience of a successor to the principalship, adding to the literature exploring other participants' views. The successor found that the validation of her legitimacy as a new leader led to actions on the part of organizational members and the attribution of positive observed results to her principalship. Further exploration of attribution as a causal factor rather than as rationalization for unexplained outcomes is proposed. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Considerable research has linked leaders’ development practices to employee performance, but little research has concentrated on how succession planning minimizes the turnover intentions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of succession planning on turnover intentions among banking professionals. Moreover, the authors examine whether succession planning enhances the employee job security and creates career attitude that mitigates the risk of employee turnover intentions.

Using the survey method, the authors recruited permanent employees of retail banking and the proposed model and structural relationships were tested via structural equation modeling.

The findings depict that succession planning provides job security and creates positive career attitude which in turn mitigate the turnover intentions among banks employees.

The present study helps the bank management to formulate a strategic and proactive succession system based on job security and build a strong career attitude to discourage the turnover intentions among banks employees. Moreover, the outcome supports the management of banks in case of the sudden resignation of a bank employee; they will be in a position to appoint a resourceful employee immediately on the vacant post to provide excellent customer services.

The current study successfully developed an empirical relationship between succession planning and turnover intentions which was skipped in the literature on human resource development. Furthermore, this study offers an important mediation mechanism for job security and career attitude for mitigating the turnover intentions among banks employees through succession planning.

The purpose of this paper is to explore teachers’ responses to the arrival of new principals (NPs) into their school. More specifically, the paper poses three questions: How do teachers perceive the arrival of an NP into their school? How do teachers cope with the arrival of an NP? What are the factors affecting teachers’ responses towards the arrival of an NP?

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 Israeli teachers who experienced the arrival of an NP into their school during the last three years.

The perceived image of the former principal in the teachers’ lounge and the manner in which s/he left principalship seem to greatly influence teachers’ responses towards the NP. Likewise, the first personal conversations of the NP with the teachers are highly influential on their responses to his/her arrival into their school.

The paper sheds light on the critical role of emotions towards the former principal in the induction stages of NPs.

Discusses a recent amendment in Nigerian universities’ law that changed the appointments of university librarians, registrars and bursars from tenured to non‐tenured. Appointments to these posts which were formerly until retirement at 65 are now for a fixed period of five years in the first instance, renewable for another term of five years at the pleasure of the governing councils and no longer. The background to this development is given and its implications for leadership motivation, continuity of policy, issues of orderly succession and the fate of the former incumbents are explored. It concludes that in the present Nigerian context, the merit of the new order far out‐weighs its demerits in terms of the much desired attainment of full academic status for librarians and leadership motivation. However, care has to be taken to ensure the future of the former incumbents within the organisations if they are to perform selflessly during their limited tenure.

The purpose of this paper is to trace a 40‐year research journey to identify organizational properties that foster the achievement of all students, regardless of socio‐economic status (SES).

The author describes a search for school properties that have an impact on the cognitive and social‐emotional development of faculty and students, with special emphasis on academic achievement.

Three characteristics of schools were identified that make a positive difference for student achievement controlling for the SES: collective efficacy, collective trust in parents and students, and academic emphasis of the school. Further these three measures are elements of a latent construct, academic emphasis of school, which is a powerful predictor of student achievement regardless of SES.

The paper identifies school variables that are often as important, or more important, than SES in explaining academic achievement, and a new model is created to explain how academic optimism influences student achievement.

Principal preparation program pedagogy and course delivery are critical to principal candidates' preparedness to lead. Research around online program delivery, however, is relatively sparse. This study examined the extent to which university-based educational leadership programs offered fully online (FOL) pathways to the principalship, as well as program geographic locations and institutional characteristics most associated with FOL offerings.

Data were collected through website reviews and coding checks, and then merged with national postsecondary data. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, classification tree analysis, and geographic information system (GIS) mapping.

Roughly 43 percent of all reviewed programs offered an FOL pathway to licensure, which suggests substantial growth in FOL offerings over the last 10 years. While a number of factors were deemed important, geographic characteristics were most associated with FOL status. GIS mapping further illustrated findings with a visual landscape of program FOL offerings.

This study considered only programs for which degrees or certificates could be earned without ever visiting campus in-person for classes. Hybrid programs were excluded from the analysis.

Findings make a clear call for more research into online principal preparation program design and course delivery.

This study provides the first overview of fully online university-based principal preparation programs in the United States while also offering a previously unavailable landscape of all programs specifically leading to licensure. It is also the only higher education study to map or investigate factors associated with FOL offerings and raises questions about prior FOL higher education research.