Outlining purpose Following a 2-year continuing professional development programme on the issues and challenges of school leadership, a team of 50 French executives from a rural and disadvantaged French district were involved in a collaborative and reflective enquiry into successful schools and principalship, under my supervision. Conceptual framework The successful principalship was investigated in the international and comparative ISSPP programme (Day, Leithwood, 2007). It revealed invariants in the success factors of schools and principals, irrespective of their social, cultural and institutional context (Day & oth., 2010; Gurr, 2015). These factors relate to three main areas: the definition of a vision, values and purposes; the development of people; and the redefinition of the school organisation. Based on evidence of student achievement, but also other indicators of success, the ISSPP study shows that principals rely on the same repertoires of core practices and that they improve teaching and learning in indirect ways. A small handful of their personal traits account for a large proportion of school success. Methods Adopting and translating the ISSPP survey protocol in the French context, and developing the survey in 3 primary schools, 5 middle schools, 3 high schools, 2 vocational schools, the group of 50 executives (composed of principals, inspectors, and pedagogical advisers), structured in teams of 3 to 4 members, conducted interviews over 6 months with principals, teachers and students to identify success factors of each school. These interviews were cross-referenced with indicators such as national assessments, exam results and other data supplied by the Ministry of Education and the local authority. Findings The survey results corroborate what has already been observed throughout numerous ISSPP publications concerning common factors shared by successful leaders (Leithwood & al., 2020). However, these results have to be contextualized in the French education system. With their specific republican values and vision, French principals have to share their roles and responsibilities with inspectors, which limits their instructional and transformational leadership with teachers. Their face difficulties to understand and consider professional and organisational learning, and they have a limited autonomy in human resources management. It prevents them from taking full advantage of opportunities for school improvement and teacher professional development. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify some attempts to move away from a bureaucratic organisation governed by planning, rules and hierarchy to promote more distributed and flexible activities and sharing new roles and responsibilities with teachers.

Day, C. and Leithwood, K. (eds.) (2007) Successful school principal leadership in times of change: International perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer. Day, C., Sammons, P., Leithwood, K., Hopkins, D., Harris, A., Gu, Q. and Brown, E. (2010) Ten strong claims about successful school leadership. Nottingham: NCSL Gurr, D. (2015) ‘A model of successful school leadership from the International Successful School Principalship Project.’ Societies, 5(1): 136–150. Leithwood, K., Harris, A. and Hopkins, D. (2020) ‘Seven strong claims about successful school leadership revisited,’ School Leadership & Management, 40(1): 5–22, DOI: 10.1080/13632434.2019.1596077