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In an era of increased autonomy and accountability in education, school principals have been given the responsibility for many tasks that used to be centralized, such as hiring and managing personnel, ensuring that the curriculum is followed and that the development of the school is on the right path. In this study an exploration is attempted into the associations among institutional context, school leadership, school climate and student outcomes.

The authors analyze data from the Programme of International Student Assessment study 2015 to identify variations in institutional context (autonomy and accountability) among education systems to determine whether and how institutional context is associated with leadership and whether education systems, in turn, are associated with school climate and students' achievement in reading. To account for the hierarchical structure of the education systems under investigation, a three-level structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was employed to analyze the data gathered on the institutions, schools and students.

No association was found between the degree of autonomy of an education system and leadership behavior; however, accountability and leadership seemed to go together. Achievement in reading competencies was greater in school systems in which principals had more autonomy. At the school level, a relationship was found between leadership and opportunities for parental involvement.

The results of this study indicate the need of strong leadership in order to have better results when there is more accountability. In this sense, the authors' findings also point to the increased importance of context-sensitive leadership skills.

The purpose of the paper is to report the findings of a synthesis of literature reviews and stakeholder interviews conducted in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The synthesis provides an overview of instructional leadership policy and practice in these six countries.

This paper reports the findings of a systematic literature review, and participant interviews, in six sub-Sahara African countries. The research links to the British Council's initiative to develop instructional leadership in developing contexts, including the six countries featured in this submission.

The findings show diverse policy and practice of instructional leadership in these African contexts. Three have no explicit policies on this important leadership construct, while the others have relevant policy statements but limited evidence of instructional leadership practice.

The research provides an overview of instructional leadership policy and practice in these six countries, but more school-based research is required to develop grounded evidence on whether and how this is practiced. The pandemic inhibited such school-based research in 2020. The study provides emerging evidence of the impact of instructional leadership on school and student outcomes, confirming what is known from international research.

Developing awareness of how instructional leadership can improve student learning, linked to appropriate training, could lead to more effective schools.

The Sustainable Development Goals stress the importance of high quality education for economic and social development. Leadership is an important aspect of quality, and the research reported in this paper shows the potential for instructional leadership to enhance student learning.

This is the first cross-national study of instructional leadership in sub-Saharan Africa.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a global digitalization of organizational activities: the pandemic forced people and organizations to profoundly review values, purposes and norms. However, the research on how digital technologies impact human relationships and interactions at work results fragmented. Still, the importance of understanding which behaviors and norms enhance social interactions and organizational performances in digital environments remains critical, especially after COVID-19 advent. Therefore, this study explores how human relationships change in a wholly digital environment and what to expect for the new normal.

The study first explores the research gap through a systematic literature review to clearly understand what emerged so far. Second, through semi-structured interviews and a focus group, an empirical analysis was conducted.

Findings suggest that both work and emotional dimensions are crucial to nurturing human relationships in a digital environment. More precisely, the study unveils the need for innovative leaders to review their approaches to communication and the work experience and consider the emotional dimension in terms of community purpose and individual well-being, while identifying rituals as an overlapping tool. Finally, the authors propose a parallelism between these results and the agile revolution to inspire leaders to rethink their leadership and behaviors getting closer to the agile approach, which may represent a valuable way to rethink human relations in our professional environment.

The paper sheds light on an ongoing phenomenon that touches the lives of each organizational actor. The two-step structure hopes to provide both a structured base of the knowledge developed to date, proposing a systematic view of what has been studied since the outbreak of the pandemic to date and to provide insights for future developments.

During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early career principals in the independent school sector from March to November 2020 in Victoria, Australia. It investigates transformative work that was undertaken by these leaders in leading their schools over a protracted crisis.

The study builds on constructs of crisis leadership, adaptive leadership, agile leadership and emotional intelligence, exploring the leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early career principals in Victoria, Australia. Using a narrative inquiry approach, across three temporal points in 2020, storied productions drawn from the findings present four emergent types of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by these principals. These leadership approaches are presented as the commander-leader, the conductor-leader, the gardener-leader and the engineer-leader with each approach demonstrating both organisational leadership approaches as well as individual leadership styles used by these principals as they led their schools.

The findings have direct implications for professional development programs focusing on aspiring principals and early career principals with emphasis on the importance of developing emotionally intelligent skillsets in principals for use during periods of rapid change or high crisis in schools. The findings present insight into the support useful for early career principals in the first five years of principalship.

This study uses a unique emotional intelligence approach to understand school leadership during and after a crisis.

The aim of this paper is to identify the role of the principal in establishing a whole school approach for health and wellbeing. Two questions are asked: (1) What do successful Swedish principals do when they take on a whole school approach? (2) How do these results relate to previous research on successful school leadership?

This paper focuses on the complexity of organisational processes and considers the role of successful leadership in managing a whole school approach to health promotion. It presents findings from two different but interlinked projects, and draws on document studies and interviews with principals, student health team members and teachers in Sweden.

This paper argues that successful school leaders are crucial in establishing a whole school approach, because of the work they do to synchronise the health-promoting activities in schools. The study identifies four aspects of coordination that need to be enacted simultaneously when leading health-promoting processes. The fifth aspect identified is that a whole school approach is not limited to the school, but the whole local school context, i.e. a synchronisation between different system levels.

Although limited in scale, this paper reports key findings that could have practical implications for school leaders. The study suggests that successful school leadership research needs to use a health-promoting lens in order to make leadership practices health-promoting practices. It also proposes extended comparative research from different fields and contexts.