The educational leader's new work

This article focuses on the leadership of school principals and headteachers. Increased accountabilities, performance target setting, and heightened expectations have established a high-stakes policy environment for leadership practice. Such demands, in turn, have yielded intended and unintended consequences for practitioners. With numerous school systems now foregrounding agendas for both leadership and school improvement, the already-demanding commitment and emotional labor required of leaders have been expanded even further. Increasingly, leadership is intensified, greedy and risky work. As a result of these developments, the extent to which the scope for autonomy and discretion available to leaders continues to be real, and whether sources of dissatisfaction in leadership now outweigh the satisfiers, is a matter for debate.