Standards for school leadership: a critical review of the literature

• Lawrence Ingvarson, Michelle Anderson,
• Teaching Australia

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22 August 2006In recent years, the context within which school leaders work has been
characterised by increasing complexity in expectations for school leaders and
greater demands for accountability. These changes have led to calls for more and
better professional preparation programs, and greater attention to programs
tailored to the needs of established school principals. The role of standards
developers is to identify what is of central importance in the preparation of school
leaders – to identify those features of leadership that are associated with student
outcomes. These changes have also called for more attention to be given to the
recruitment and selection of suitable school principals and to conditions of work
that will increase the retention of effective leaders. Standards have a role to play
here also in pointing to fair and valid forms of evidence to assess the performance of
school leaders. Expectations of what teachers and school leaders should know and be able to do change over time and context, as they do in most professions. Standards must
reflect those changes. But with school leaders, expectations often appear to have
outstripped the quality and supply of training and support write Lawrence Ingvarson, Michelle Anderson, Peter Gronn and Andrew Jackson in this literature review.