The International Successful School Principal Project (ISSPP) included from its start in 2002 teams of researchers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, England, Canada, the United States, Australia and Hong Kong. Each team has developed and reported on case studies of successful leadership in their own countries. To date, these teams have produced over 65 case studies. As the project has evolved, we decided that the issue of sustainable success required further examination. At this point in time, five years after our first visits to the case schools, the teams in Denmark, Sweden and Norway have re-visited some of these schools in order to explore transpirations during the intervening years. This symposium ‘Successful Principals Revisited – five years later’ aims to better understand what successful principals do in today’s demanding accountability context, and will focus on strategies used by the leaders to maintain success in their schools in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The papers in the proposed symposium are based on the research we conducting when revisiting our successful schools.