Globally, educational leaders are confronting unprecedented complexity. Schools are being asked to improve student learning outcomes while simultaneously responding to escalating wellbeing concerns, inclusion and belonging, workforce readiness, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, teacher shortages, parental expectations, and growing accountability pressures.
As a result, the role of the school leader has fundamentally evolved. Educational leadership can no longer be understood primarily as administration, operational management, or policy implementation alone. Increasingly, school leaders are expected to guide organizational learning, instructional improvement, professional capability development, innovation, and long-term strategic adaptation within environments defined by continuous change and uncertainty.
In many respects, this represents one of the most significant shifts in educational leadership over the last half century.
From Administration to Organizational Learning: A Half-Century of Shift
Historically, educational leadership focused heavily on management. Schools were expected to maintain organizational stability through effective supervision, scheduling, budgeting, staffing, and curriculum delivery. For much of the twentieth century, schools themselves were not generally viewed as organizations expected to continuously evolve or improve. Stability and consistency were prioritized over adaptation or innovation, and leadership preparation concentrated primarily on administration and operational efficiency.
This understanding began to change significantly during the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of the “effective schools” movement. Researchers such as Ronald Edmonds and Michael Rutter demonstrated that schools themselves could significantly influence student achievement despite serving similar demographic populations and communities. Leadership, culture, instructional focus, and organizational expectations increasingly emerged as critical variables influencing educational outcomes. The field of school improvement was born from this realization.
The Effective Schools Movement Changes Everything
Over the following decades, educational thought became increasingly influenced by organizational learning, systems thinking, reflective practice, and professional inquiry traditions emerging across business, healthcare, and organizational development sectors. Schools gradually came to be viewed less as static bureaucratic institutions and more as adaptive social systems capable of continuous learning and improvement.
The work of Donald Schön emphasized the importance of reflective practice and professional judgment, while Peter Senge popularized the concept of the “learning organization.” Curriculum theorists such as Lawrence Stenhouse advanced the idea that educators themselves should act as reflective practitioners and co-constructors of educational improvement rather than passive implementers of externally designed reform.
Improvement increasingly became associated with:
- collaborative inquiry,
- professional learning communities,
- systems thinking,
- reflective practice,
- and continuous learning cultures.
Educational leadership consequently evolved from a primarily managerial function toward a discipline concerned with organizational learning, professional capability, and collective improvement.
This historical evolution is summarized here in Figure 1.
Figure 1 – The Evolution of School Improvement
The Accountability Era and Its Tensions
During the 1990s and early 2000s, globalization and increasing public scrutiny intensified demands for measurable educational performance. Governments sought greater assurance that educational systems were delivering results. International benchmarking systems such as PISA, alongside inspection and accountability frameworks such as Ofsted in the UK, significantly shaped educational discourse around quality, accountability, standards-based reform, and evidence-informed planning.
This period produced important advances in data-informed decision making and system accountability. However, it also introduced tensions into the field. Critics argued that excessive reliance on technical metrics risked reducing improvement to compliance exercises while undermining professional judgment, innovation, and adaptive learning. Educational systems increasingly found themselves balancing two competing forces: accountability and measurement on one hand, and organizational learning and professional capability on the other.
A New Integration: Beyond Programs and Interventions
Today, the field is evolving once again. Increasingly, educational systems recognize that sustainable improvement requires more than isolated initiatives or episodic strategic plans. Schools must develop the internal capacity to continuously learn, adapt, innovate, and improve over time. Contemporary school improvement increasingly integrates instructional leadership, organizational culture, implementation science, professional capability development, wellbeing, inclusion, systems thinking, and strategic innovation.
In many respects, improvement has evolved from being viewed as a program or intervention into a permanent organizational condition. This evolution has profound implications for leadership.
Why Leadership Is the Critical Variable
Few findings in educational research are more consistent than the conclusion that leadership matters deeply. While classroom instruction remains the single greatest school-based influence on student learning, research over several decades has consistently demonstrated that leadership is the second most influential school-based factor affecting student outcomes, organizational effectiveness, and long-term school improvement.
As Kenneth Leithwood (OISE) famously observed, leadership is “second only to classroom instruction among school-based influences on student learning.”
Importantly, leadership rarely improves schools directly through authority alone. Rather, leadership influences the organizational conditions under which teaching, learning, collaboration, implementation, and improvement occur. Researchers such as Kenneth Leithwood and Viviane Robinson demonstrated that successful educational leaders influence improvement through establishing direction, developing people, redesigning organizations, and strengthening instructional programs. In other words, leaders shape the ecosystem within which improvement becomes possible.
This body of research fundamentally reframed educational leadership. School leaders increasingly came to be viewed not simply as administrators, but as instructional leaders, organizational learning leaders, culture builders, implementation leaders, and improvement architects. Effective leaders strengthen organizational coherence, professional learning, implementation capacity, and collective efficacy.
Research also increasingly demonstrated that sustainable improvement depends as much on organizational culture and professional capability as on technical strategy alone. Leaders significantly influence trust, collaboration, professional expectations, organizational coherence, and collective efficacy. Schools with strong improvement cultures tend to have leaders who articulate shared purpose, model learning, support inquiry, and maintain organizational focus. Conversely, fragmented leadership often produces initiative overload, weak implementation, and improvement fatigue.
The growing influence of implementation science has reinforced this understanding further. Increasingly, researchers argue that initiatives themselves do not improve schools; implementation does. Many improvement efforts fail not because the underlying ideas are weak, but because organizations lack implementation capacity. Leaders therefore play a critical role in aligning resources, pacing change, supporting professional learning, sustaining coherence, and building organizational readiness for improvement over time.
Contemporary research also highlights the growing importance of collective efficacy and the shared belief among educators that, together, they can positively influence student learning and organizational improvement. Research associated with John Hattie identifies collective efficacy as one of the strongest influences on student achievement. Leadership plays a central role in building this belief through collaboration, professional learning, trust, and coherent organizational direction.
Canada’s Outsized Global Influence
Canada has played a globally influential role in shaping these conversations. Researchers such as Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, and Kenneth Leithwood have significantly influenced international understanding of system coherence, collaborative professionalism, sustainable educational change, leadership impact, and organizational learning. Ontario’s reform efforts in the early 2000s became internationally recognized partly because they emphasized leadership development, professional learning, and system-wide coherence rather than purely punitive accountability structures.
The field is now evolving again. Increasingly, educational leadership is being connected not simply to instructional supervision or school management, but to broader organizational and human capability development. Modern school leaders are increasingly expected to build adaptive organizations, steward innovation, lead AI and digital transformation, strengthen wellbeing systems, support workforce development, and sustain continuous organizational learning amidst accelerating complexity and disruption.
Developing Leaders Equal to the Challenge
If school improvement has evolved from episodic reform into a permanent organizational condition, then educational leadership development must evolve as well.
This raises an important question for educational systems globally: How do we intentionally develop leaders capable of leading meaningful and sustainable improvement?
Increasingly, professional learning research suggests that leadership capability is strengthened not through isolated workshops or disconnected theory, but through sustained, inquiry-based, practice-connected learning experiences embedded within authentic organizational contexts.
This understanding informed the development of the OISE Continuing & Professional Learning Leading School Improvement Master Certificate.
This program is designed as a structured, practice-based leadership inquiry experience for educational leaders responsible for guiding improvement within schools and systems. Rather than approaching improvement as an abstract leadership concept, program participants engage directly with a real improvement priority connected to their own organizational context. Through collaborative inquiry, evidence-informed reflection, peer dialogue, facilitator guidance, and applied implementation work, participants strengthen their capacity to translate leadership learning into meaningful organizational movement.
The program reflects many of the principles emerging from contemporary school improvement research: professional learning that is job-embedded, collaborative, reflective, inquiry-oriented, and connected directly to organizational practice. Its focus is not simply leadership learning in the abstract, but strengthening the organizational capability required for sustainable improvement.
Educational leadership has evolved significantly over the last half century. What began primarily as school administration has increasingly become the leadership of organizational learning, adaptation, implementation, and continuous improvement. As schools confront accelerating complexity and change, the ability to lead meaningful improvement may now represent one of the most important capabilities educational leaders can possess.
The future of education will belong not to institutions capable of managing stability, but to those capable of learning, adapting, and improving continuously over time. And that work ultimately depends on leadership.
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By Dr. Elisabeth Rees-Johnstone,
Executive Director, OISE Continuing & Professional Learning
May 29, 2026
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References
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Addison-Wesley.
Edmonds, R. (1979). Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 37(1), 15–24.
Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change. Jossey-Bass.
Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. Teachers College Press.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.
Leithwood, K., Harris, A., & Hopkins, D. (2020). Seven strong claims about successful school leadership revisited. School Leadership & Management, 40(1), 5–22.
Robinson, V. M. J. (2011). Student-centered leadership. Jossey-Bass.
Rutter, M., Maughan, B., Mortimore, P., & Ouston, J. (1979). Fifteen thousand hours: Secondary schools and their effects on children. Harvard University Press.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday.
Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. Heinemann.
