In contrast with the former administrative commanding “one man leadership”, Russian schools have been granted by law opportunities to exercise independence to meet the learners’ educational needs, interests and capabilities, and there is a wide scope of issues to be decided at school level in terms of education content, pedagogy, and extracurricular activities. At the same time, the preliminary findings of an investigation of teachers’ and students’ involvement in decision making processes in Russian schools reveal that they do not participate in these processes. These findings emerged from the first stage of the action-research project. The data were collected from the respondents (teachers and students) of various institutions of Saint Petersburg. The second stage of the action-research conducted in one of Saint Petersburg schools aimed to engage the school leadership in the critical analyses of teachers’ and students’ involvement in decision making and the corresponding suggestions and strategies for improvement, This paper reports the third stage of the research which is an inquiry into the impact of the change strategies. The paper also critically analyses the effectiveness of the pilot study.