This review aims to demonstrate that a great deal of a school's success depends on which areas of school life the educational leader chooses to spend time and attention on. It calls for more research and policy attention to be given to the career paths of school principals in order to meet the challenge of identifying and developing the next generation of school leaders. The review is organized into five sections. The first section introduces the three interrelated elements of leadership of school context, school organization, and school leader. Section 2 focuses on the school context, with reference to the forces currently pressing on schools and the implications of these forces for schools and their leaders. Section 3 examines school organizations with a focus on evolving models that move us beyond the outmoded bureaucratic model to communities of professional learners. Section 4 targets the school leader, first questioning whether one type, or "size," of leadership fits all and subsequently what it means to be a successful leader. Section 4 also examines the following: the issue of leader recruitment and retention, including succession planning; leadership in pre-retirement; leadership in small schools and schools in high-poverty communities; leader autonomy and responsibility; leader professional learning and standards, and new shared models of leadership. Most of the explicit references to the conference papers occur in Section 4. Section 5 brings together the key issues and challenges from the earlier sections and makes a number of policy recommendations. (Contains 20 figures.) [Foreword by Geoff Southworth.]