How to Strengthen Leadership in Educational Institutions

Leadership in educational institutions is not simply a matter of seniority or administrative rank. It is one of the most powerful drivers of institutional quality, student outcomes, and teacher performance. Research consistently shows that school leaders are second only to classroom teachers in their influence on learning outcomes. Yet, globally, many institutions still struggle with weak leadership pipelines, opaque selection processes, and disconnected training programs. Strengthening educational leadership requires deliberate action across four key areas: regulatory support, coherent leadership policies, rigorous leader selection, and sustained training and development.

Why leadership in education matters so much 🔗

The UNESCO Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report 2024/5, titled Leadership in Education: Lead for Learning, is one of the most comprehensive recent studies on this subject. The report emphasizes the crucial role of educational leaders in shaping their institutions and communities, and highlights the importance of identifying, selecting, training, and supporting individuals with the necessary skills and vision for leadership positions. It further notes that in the United States, school leadership has been estimated to account for up to 27% of the variation in student performance – only slightly less than the influence of teachers themselves. That is a significant finding. It tells us that investing in better leaders is not optional – it is essential.

The GEM Report stresses the need for national plans to focus on four key aspects of leadership: setting expectations, focusing on learning, fostering collaboration, and developing human potential. These four dimensions frame how institutions should think about leadership at every level.

Regulatory support: how policies foster effective leadership 🔗

Strong educational leadership does not emerge in a vacuum. It requires a supportive policy environment – one where regulations clearly define what good leadership looks like, provide resources to develop it, and hold institutions accountable for results.

Education Leadership Policy refers to the frameworks and guidelines that govern the practices and standards for leaders in educational settings. It encompasses various aspects such as the recruitment, training, and evaluation of educational leaders, with the goal of enhancing the quality of education. When these frameworks are well designed, they create a foundation that supports consistent, equitable leadership across all levels of an institution – from department heads to deans to institutional heads.

Policies grounded in solid research are more likely to be effective and garner support from the educational community. Additionally, collaboration is essential, as incorporating the perspectives and expertise of all stakeholders results in more comprehensive and impactful policies. This is why effective regulatory frameworks are not top-down directives alone – they are built through consultation with educators, community members, and institutional leaders themselves.

The Learning Policy Institute’s research on state approaches to developing educational leaders makes a related point: states can expand access to leadership development and make access more equitable by investing in ongoing statewide initiatives, such as leadership academies or institutes. Building the infrastructure for leadership-relevant professional learning can allow for long-term capacity building of a state’s leadership workforce and create opportunities for leaders to access a continuum of support over the course of their career.

However, regulations must also be realistic. Expectations of principals are often too high, with 68% of their time in a survey of 14 middle-income countries being spent on routine management tasks, leaving too little time for principals to set a vision. Effective policy, therefore, must also work to reduce administrative overload so that leaders can actually lead.

Effective leadership policies: ensuring consistency across management levels 🔗

One of the most persistent challenges in educational institutions is inconsistency – where strong leadership exists in one department or campus but is entirely absent in another. Effective leadership policies address this by setting consistent standards across all levels of management.

School boards are usually responsible for setting strategic direction, approving budgets, and establishing policies, while district leadership might focus on curriculum standards and professional development. Understanding these roles helps delineate clear boundaries and responsibilities for educational leaders. When these boundaries blur or overlap without clear policy guidance, accountability weakens and institutional performance suffers.

A useful model comes from Ontario, Canada. The province of Ontario utilizes a leadership framework that sets out nine system, district, and school level leadership standards, including setting a broadly shared vision, providing coherent instructional guidance, aligning budget and policies with the institutional mission, and advocating for a policy-focused approach to governance among local school boards. This kind of multi-level framework ensures that leadership priorities are not siloed – they cascade consistently from the top of the system to individual classrooms.

At the policy level, agencies could integrate leadership competency standards into accreditation frameworks, ensuring that academic leaders are assessed not only on operational compliance but also on their ability to articulate vision, foster innovation, and strengthen organizational culture. This approach transforms policy from a compliance tool into a genuine quality-improvement mechanism.

Proper selection of leaders: recruiting the right people 🔗

Policies and training programs can only succeed if the right people are in leadership roles in the first place. Yet the selection of educational leaders remains one of the weakest links in many systems worldwide.

Only 63% of countries use open, competitive processes to select school leaders, even though this has positive effects on school performance. Non-transparent recruitment procedures often result in qualified candidates being overlooked. The Austrian UNESCO Commission’s review of the GEM Report bluntly states that the best teachers are not automatically the best leaders, which is why leadership skills need to be specifically developed and promoted.

This is a critical insight. Many institutions – particularly in higher education – continue to appoint leaders on the basis of academic seniority or subject expertise, rather than demonstrated leadership competency. The GEM Report recommends a different approach. The selection of school leaders should be open, equitable, and inclusive, so that suitable people have a fair chance to grow into their leadership roles, and elements of leadership development should already be promoted during teacher training.

Gender equity in selection also remains an urgent issue. Only 19% of education ministers globally are women, and in higher education, women hold only 13% of vice-chancellor positions in many university systems. Institutions and governments need selection policies that actively address these imbalances through transparent, merit-based recruitment and targeted leadership acceleration programs for underrepresented groups.

Recent studies recommend that leadership audits and competency-based training frameworks be institutionalized to ensure continuity and improvement in leadership practices across higher education. A selection process backed by clear competency standards makes the criteria objective, defensible, and focused on what institutions actually need from their leaders.

Training and development: building leaders who can perform 🔗

Even when the right leaders are selected, they need ongoing development to perform effectively. Leadership is not a fixed skill – it evolves with institutional demands, policy changes, and the needs of students and staff. This makes continuous training a non-negotiable component of any serious effort to strengthen educational leadership.

The Learning Policy Institute’s 2024 brief on developing deeper learning leaders confirms that school leaders strongly influence teacher working conditions, classroom instruction, school environments, and student learning, and that leadership preparation and in-service programs help school leaders acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to enable, encourage, and sustain deeper learning.

But not all training programs are equally effective. The GEM Report reveals a significant global gap: almost half of principals in richer countries do not receive any training before appointment, and only 31% of all countries have regulations for the induction of new principals. Practical skills like data use, financial management, and digital literacy are also essential, yet a quarter of principals in richer countries lack adequate training in such areas.

A global analysis shows that less than half of training programs address the four essential leadership dimensions – expectation management, focus on learning, collaboration, and staff development – and only a third fully cover all four. This means the majority of training programs leave significant gaps in the very competencies that matter most.

Effective programs address this through structured, practice-based approaches. Organizations like the New Leaders network demonstrate what well-designed training looks like in practice: through Leadership Development Pathways, the organization provides an immersive, competency-based training experience for school and district leaders at multiple levels – from teacher leaders to principal supervisors – with interactive tools, instructional strategies, individualized coaching, and community support required to deliver breakthrough results and sustained student outcomes.

Critically, training must also emphasize collaboration – yet this is the dimension most commonly underemphasized. Collaboration is the most underemphasized of the four leadership dimensions in training programmes, with only half of countries explicitly emphasizing teacher collaboration in their leadership standards and barely one third of leadership training programmes focusing on it. Institutions that invest in shared leadership – distributing responsibilities to assistant principals, department heads, and teacher leaders – create more resilient and responsive organizations.

The UNESCO GEM Report recommends institutionalizing mandatory certification and training programs for school principals and headteachers, covering all four leadership dimensions, and moving beyond the single-leader model to create collaborative leadership structures that engage teachers, community members, and students. These recommendations point to a future where leadership is not a title held by one person but a capacity distributed across an institution.

Putting it all together 🔗

Strengthening educational leadership is not a single reform – it is a system-level commitment. Regulatory frameworks must set clear, evidence-based expectations while reducing bureaucratic burden on leaders. Leadership policies must be consistent across all management levels, not just at the top. Selection processes must be open, competitive, and built around genuine leadership competencies rather than seniority alone. And training must be continuous, practical, and aligned with the actual demands of the role.

As the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education notes in its review of the 2024/5 GEM Report, effective school, system, and policy leaders can significantly impact educational outcomes, making the identification, selection, training, and support of individuals with the necessary skills and vision for leadership positions critically important. The evidence is clear – the question is whether institutions and policymakers will act on it with the urgency it deserves.

What do you think? Does your institution have a transparent, competency-based process for selecting educational leaders – or is seniority still the primary factor? And how much of the leadership training at your institution actually focuses on collaboration and instructional quality, rather than just administrative compliance?

References

1. https://www.unesco.org/gem-report/en/publication/leadership
2. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED658820
3. https://www.unesco.at/en/education/article/article/leadership-in-education-unesco-gem-report-2024-5
4. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/developing-deeper-learning-leaders-brief
5. https://www.newleaders.org/programs
6. https://www.european-agency.org/news/2024-gem-report