David Hopkins

Since its emergence in the early 2000s, system leadership has been viewed as an important driver for building system capacity required for positive change. System leaders are those Heads or Principals who are willing to shoulder system wide roles in order to support the improvement of other schools as well as their own. The chapter is divided into three sections: the first, outlines the genesis of System Leadership pre-2010; the second, reviews the international literature post 2010 as the concept achieves maturity and is better embedded in policy reforms in many countries; and third, future challenges are identified.

For the sake of historical completeness, it is important to recognise the pioneering work of Aikin (1942) in the ‘eight-year study’, and a number of reviews take this important event as their starting point (Nunnery, 1998; Stringfield & Teddlie, 2011). For the broader purposes of this review, we begin two decades later, at a time when (it can be argued) the field was beginning to evolve in a number of distinctive phases as practitioners and researchers gained expertise in implementing and studying educational change.