Cities are often epicentres of innovation, influence and international trends. However, within education research and policy circles, city-based educational provision is often unilaterally labelled as challenging, difficult and disadvantaged. While most other disciplines and industries consider cities, especially Global Cities (Sassen, 1991), to be centres of internationally leading practice, education remains solely focused on the challenges presented by inner city schooling. As more of the world’s population moves into urban areas, reimagining city-based education as a potentially positive opportunity for innovative and excellent practice becomes increasingly important.

With the geographic proximity of so many city-based school leaders, the emphasis on school-to-school networking and the drive for excellence in most urban jurisdictions, why do educators, policy makers and researchers not adopt a more innovation-driven and positive attitude toward their city-based work? While the simple answers to this question are ever present in the education literature including diversity of student home language, poverty and family support, we use evidence from our new 3-years study of young global city school leaders in New York, London and Toronto-three top 10 Global Cities (Foreign Affairs, 2008) to examine this issue. Based on our review of the literature and our preliminary discussions with over 75 leaders, we posit a new model for considering opportunities for rethinking urban education as an opportunity for innovation and excellence.

The next generation of school leaders. Due to leader shortages attributed to teacher disinterest in leadership (Gronn and Lacey, 2004) and escalating headteacher retirements (Howson, 2008), London is currently experiencing a downshift in the age of school-based leaders (DCSF, 2009). Anecdotally, other Global Cities are also experiencing ever-growing cohorts of young school leaders. As little research examines the experience, practice, ideas or influence of this next generation of leaders, our study fills an important void in the knowledge based related to this cohort of leaders.

Generation X leaders. Our work focuses on under-38 year old Generation X (GenXers) leaders as they have experienced the most rapidly expanding technological era and are recognized as globally minded, techno-literate, informal and pragmatic (Zemke et al, 2000). These oft-shared traits shape GenXers’ desire for collaboration (Smola and Sutton, 2002), mobility (Duscher and Cowin, 2004), diversity and more experimental structures in organisations (Kunreuther, 2003). The overall research study seeks to understand the possibly unique features and trends within this cohort of leaders’ career paths, sense of professional identity, experience, development and aspirations. In combination with our focus on the educational context in 3 Global Cities, this research examines how the next generation of school leaders views city-based education and their individual and collective leadership.

Gronn, P. and Lacey, K. (2004) ‘Positioning oneself for leadership: Feelings of vulnerability among aspirant principals’, School Leadership and Management, 24 (4), 405–424. Kunreuther, F. (2003) ‘The changing of the guard: What generational differences tell us about social-change organisations’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 32, 450–457. Smola, K. and Sutton, C. (2002) ‘Generational differences: revisiting generational work values for the new millennium’, Journal of Organisational Behaviour, 23, 363–382. Zemke, R., Raines, C. and Filipczak, B. (2000) Generations at Work: Managing the clash of veterans, boomers, xers, and nexters in your workplace. New York: AMA Publications. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.