This symposium is the result of an EU-funded Erasmus+ project on School Leader Evaluation which was implemented between September 2015 and July 2017. The project’s name is “Evaluation of School Leaders and Teaching Practice” and it is better known through its acronym: the EOSLATP project. The partners of this project were inspectorate agencies from Portugal, Prahova Region (Romania), Kaunas Region (Lithuania), Bolzano (Italy), with the Basque Country (Spain) as coordinator of the project. In addition, two universities took part in the process as trainers, scientific support and evaluators: the University of Cumbria (UK) and the Open University of Cyprus (Cyprus). The project sought to examine the development of successful and effective school leadership evaluation processes, criteria and instruments based on various theoretical frameworks, drawing primarily from the different regions in Europe, which were represented in the project, as listed above.

We know from the literature that the role of the principal as a school leader has become quite complex and demanding. This is the result of: a) external, societal, demographic, and economic changes, b) the growing accountability movement, and c) pressures for raising school performance. We also know that school leaders exert a great influence on the teams led by them, especially on the pedagogical philosophy of the school. Actually, it has been claimed that school leaders are second only to teachers as a crucial factor for successful and effective schools. Therefore, it is important that we evaluate what these leaders do in the life of the schools they lead.

However, we should be aware of the fact that when discussing the evaluation of principals there is always a strong emphasis on what is objective, measurable, and practically controllable to the extent possible. Even within this (inevitably) reduced frame of reference there are many different perspectives and we acknowledge the fact that even the most “objective” data can (and will) be subjectively interpreted. Moreover, the purposes and practices of the evaluation of principals are likely to be viewed differently by national policy makers, school governors and managers, teachers, students, the parents of students and, of course, researchers, although there is likely to be a common core of interest in educational outcomes that is relevant for all.

Moreover, we should bear in mind that the nature of school leaders’ role is highly contextual and thus standard procedures could not reliably work in all situations. In order to be able to respond to the contemporary demands of school leader evaluation it is important to address the following sets of questions, which will form the basis for this symposium:

I. Why should school principals be evaluated?

II. How are school principals (best) evaluated?

III. What should we know and what should we do, depending on which stage of their careers principals are?

IV. What do the countries represented in this symposium do with regards to school leaders’ evaluation in their particular countries/regions?

Based on the above, it can be concluded that the symposium assumes a holistic perspective in order to provide a more inclusive view of successful evaluation of school principals, utilizing concrete examples of everyday practices in order to illustrate in a rather applied way (but from a data-based evidence point of view), how successful evaluation of school leaders is operationalized in various regions of Europe.

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