Purpose This paper is a meta-synthesis of 20 years evidence about successful school leadership practices across nine countries. Specifically, this study answers the following four questions: • How was success defined in different contexts? • What were the successful principalship practices (SPPs) in relation to contexts? • How did national and local external and school contexts influence SPPs? • How did the above-mentioned phenomena vary over the years? Theoretical Perspectives This review began with the framework used by Leithwood and Day in their 2007 review of ISSPP publications, along with a coding scheme developed from that framework. The coding scheme has evolved as new findings emerged. These findings suggest the need for a more complex framework to illustrate the results, hence the adoption of Bronfenbrenner's ecological system theory (1979) and complexity theory (Morrison, 2010) as the theoretical perspectives. Methods Evidence for the review was provided by eighty-five articles and twenty-three chapters emanating from the International Successful School Principal Project (ISSPP) reporting 95 successful school cases from Australia, Cyprus, Israel, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Spain, the UK, and the USA. The study attempts to unpack the complexity in principal’s leadership and adds to our knowledge of how principals achieve and sustain student success in different national, local, and school contexts and over time by examining high-quality case study evidence from the largest, longest-running international research project in this field. We adopted the meta-ethnography technique (Noblit & Hare, 1988; Major & Savin-Baden, 2011) for this review. Findings Successful principals across all jurisdictions share common sets of core educational values, qualities, and practices, but enact these in different ways and over different time periods during their tenure according to context sensitive, context responsive judgements they make. Their efforts build academic culture, disciplinary climate, collective instructional capacity, collective leadership capacity, positive emotions, and ecological resilience of the school. Significance There has been a lack of robust reporting from qualitative studies on the relationship between contexts and school leadership. This paper aims to address this gap by reporting the patterns of how successful principals implement common leadership practices in different contexts, external and international contexts influence on them, and the strategies they use over time and in different phases. These findings provide guidance for practitioners and policy makers about professional development for principals focused on developing successful principalship practices common across many contexts and varied practices in response to different contexts and status of schools.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard university press. Morrison, K. (2010). Complexity theory, school leadership and management: Questions for theory and practice. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 38(3), 374-393. Noblit, W. G. & Hare, D. R. (1988), Meta-ethnography: Synthesizing qualitative studies. SAGE. Savin-Baden, M., & Major, C. H. (2007). Using interpretative meta-ethnography to explore the relationship between innovative approaches to learning and their influence on faculty understanding of teaching. Higher Education, 54(6), 833–852.