For Bill Mulford (2010) educational leadership matters and there is a clear relationship between leadership and effective schooling; this view is echoed throughout the literature in the field. For a school to become a community of professional learners requires the school leader to fundamentally rethink how they work and manage. However, advocates of leadership do not propose a one-size-fits-all form of leadership; whether it is instructional, transformational, or distributed leadership, it has to take into account aspects of the contextual forces, conditions such as the location of the school, its size, the socio-economic composition of the learners that attend the school, and the existing culture of the school:

This view is echoed in Reynolds et al (2015: 85): ‘Successful heads use the same basic leadership practices, but there is no single model for achieving success.’ In addition: ‘we must be wary of overly simplistic generalisations that promote a universal notion of effective leadership’ (Reynolds et al, 2015: 86). However, school leaders should have a strong sense of moral responsibility and a belief in equal opportunities.

Michael Fullan is a well-known author in the field of educational leadership, school improvement, and educational reform generally. He was Special Policy Adviser in Education to the Premier of Ontario from 2004 to 2013, and during this time he focused on building capacity, leading from the middle, and complete system reform. Following the election of the New Labour government in the United Kingdom in 1997, Fullan became involved in reform of the UK's education system and viewed school improvement as central to Blair's ‘Third Way’ neoliberalism. Michael Fullan has had a significant impact on research in the field and was the first to view educational reform as having a moral purpose.