The literature on leaders and leadership is enormous: the Google search engine offers some ten million references for each of these concepts. I suspect most of this, both generally as well as specifically in education, has been written in the last decade or so. Although there has been a stream of sociological and social psychological studies of leadership, the sudden expansion was in polemical tracts for business and industry, which later spread to public services such as education and health. It is the increasing importance, in the spheres of both policy and practice in education, of how leadership relates to school improvement and school effectiveness, that has dominated what has been thought and written. Indeed, the creation of the National College of School Leadership (NCSL) in 2000 is probably a reflection of, as well as a contributor to, this trend. NCSL may, at the same time, be an agent for promoting leadership for a deeper transformation that looks well beyond current structures, cultures and priorities in education

Does the concept of lifelong learning change the way we currently think about leadership in education? Does it provide a particular perspective on leaders and leadership? Probably. A commitment to lifelong learning as it affects school-age education focuses on particular educational outcomes, namely the preservation of the motivation to learn and the enhancement of the capacity to learn. But whether such educational purposes require a particular form of leadership has not been a topic of importance. Rather, the conception of leadership for school improvement and effectiveness has been heavily constrained by current policy and research outcomes, which emphasise the test performance and public examination results of young learners: it focuses on what students achieve in the present, not what they are to be and to achieve through their future learning.