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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to extend knowledge of how school actors’ conditions, understandings, and priorities influence what is regarded as school success and successful principalship. Empirically, it is based on a detailed analysis of how school success and successful principalship is understood and acted in a rural Swedish school context.

Design/methodology/approach: Inspired by ecological system and complexity theories, together with protocols recently established in the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), we applied a mixed method approach combining half–structured interviews and a teacher-survey. In total we conducted 16 interviews with school leaders, teachers, students, parents, a superintendent, and a student counsellor.

Findings: The interviewed school actors emphasized the importance of trust and combining efforts to maintain sufficiently good academic results with respect for students’ needs and wellbeing. They described success in their school context as being built on cooperation and teamwork that preserves well-proven values and practices, with flexible, well-qualified teachers supporting students’ efforts to attain their individual goals while simultaneously seeking to widen their perspectives and knowledge.

Originality/value:  Previous research on principalship in rural schools has shown the importance of individual principals maintaining a high profile and closely cooperating with the surrounding community. We add nuance to this understanding of successful principalship by highlighting the value of principals focusing on teamwork, drawing on their schools’ existing culture and the surrounding community to create a stable learning environment for students, while striving to lead incremental changes.

External networks among deputy superintendents seem to be an increasing phenomenon in a sector that faces a rapid change and a high working load. Is this the new way to learn and improve the organization or just a social gathering with little value? In this study, the significance of networking among deputy superintendents is explored. This group of middle managers is less studied compared to superintendents. The following questions have guided the study: How are their networks designed? What themes and issues do they focus on? What networks are considered relevant? The data for this study were collected through a survey of participants in a seminar series arranged by the Swedish National Professional Association for Superintendents. Networking appears to blend operational, personal, and strategic issues, intertwining practical matters with personal and professional growth to address present challenges and future requirements. Even if networking is seen as less formal it requires individual engagement as it is embedded in a process to become a professional space that benefits both the individual and the school organization. Networks appear to provide essential resources for navigating the complexities embedded in tangled logics and the frequently unpredictable processes that follow.

In Sweden as in many other countries, there is increasing segregation due to students' socio–economic background. This study aims to identify and nuance what successful school principalship looks like in a school situated in a low socioeconomic area. The school has, for several years, had a high turnover of principals and teachers in combination with low academic results among students. The study seeks answers on how leadership promotes teacher quality, academic emphasis, and equity in the organization to turn around a school and make success sustainable. Studying a school with students who have not yet received high academic grades means we look for other signs of success. We used a mixed methods approach for interviews and a survey for teachers based on the revised ISSPP protocol. The first priority of the principal was to restructure the school day and introduce common pedagogical models to improve teaching. After two years in the organization, the principal is now taking ownership and creating an inclusive agenda. There are many ongoing complex processes in the school, where the principal’s energy and initiative is crucial. One concern is how the principal can go deeper and wider, sustaining the momentum.

This article aims to explore educational infrastructures for superintendents’ and deputy superintendents’ professional development and to analyse what kind of professional development these infrastructures bolster. The article builds on a qualitative case study focusing on the central municipal level in Sweden. Findings are based on data from digitally conducted interviews with superintendents and deputy superintendents. The results show that prevailing infrastructures mainly emphasise rational understandings of knowledge and people and practical skills, making it possible for superintendents to carry out their everyday tasks. To a lesser extent, infrastructures support questioning the taken-for-granted understandings on school leadership and challenge and reshape collective professional knowledge in partnership with other professionals. Therefore, the results indicate that theory and research are seldom used as a basis for professional development. In addition, the analysis also showed that superintendents’ professional development is more linked to personal initiatives and motivation rather than planned initiatives the municipal and/or state-level administration designed. The article concludes that infrastructure design, at different levels of the school system, must consider different approaches for professional development given the complexity of and expectations on superintendents’ work.

Policy makers increasingly acknowledge that problems and challenges arising at the school level should be resolved on site. At the same time, the political expectation to delegate more responsibility to the individual school is rather heavily contrasted with the weak knowledge about how this new public management approach can be translated into successful leadership practices. Thus, considering that there is a close relationship between context and leadership, principal preparation programmes should be guided by a deeper examination of contextual factors. Against this background, we aim to critically examine existing views of practitioners and researchers on the challenge of establishing more context-sensitive school leadership preparation programmes in an era of New Public Management in Education. In doing so, we introduce the Swedish Model of principal preparation as an example for a more context-sensitive leadership preparation program. To that end, we argue that a differentiated perspective about contextual conditions and their role as facilitators or obstacles to effective leadership must be further explored. Moreover, school leaders should be encouraged to consider the relevance of such approaches to their own needs.

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