Day, Christopher and Gu, Qing and Sammons, Pam (2016) The impact of leadership on student outcomes: how successful school leaders use transformational and instructional strategies to make a difference. Educational Administration

Purpose: This paper illustrates how successful leaders combine the too often dichotomised practices of transformational and instructional leadership in different ways across different phases of their schools’ development in order to progressively shape and ‘layer’ the improvement culture in making a difference to students’ outcomes. Research methods: Empirical data were drawn from a three-year mixed methods national study (“Impact Study”) which investigated associations between the work of principals in effective and improving primary and secondary schools in England and student outcomes as defined (but not confined) by their national examination and assessment results over three years (Day et al., 2011; Sammons et al., 2011; 2014).The research began with a critical survey of the extant literature, followed by a national survey which explored principals’ and key staff’s perceptions of school improvement strategies and actions that they believed had helped foster better student attainment. This was complemented by multi-perspective in-depth case studies of a sub-sample of twenty schools. Findings and implications: The research provides new empirical evidence of how successful principals directly and indirectly promote improvement over time through combining both transformational and instructional leadership strategies. Its findings show that the school’s ability to improve and sustain effectiveness over the long term is the result of principals’ understanding and diagnosis of their school’s needs and applications of clearly articulated and organisationally shared and applied educational values and combinations and accumulations of contextThe Impact of Leadership sensitive strategies which are ‘layered’ within and across school development phases through which improvements in the school’s work, culture and achievements are progressively embedded. The mixed methods research design provides a finer grained, more nuanced evidence based understanding of the leadership roles of principals in effective and improving schools in achieving and sustaining educational outcomes in schools than is possible through either single lens quantitative analyses and meta-analyses or purely qualitative approaches.