This paper argues that educational policies and changes in Wales over the last thirty years have somewhat neglected issues concerned with management and leadership, in comparison with other countries and within the UK. More recently, however, leadership development has been provided and the Welsh National Academy for Educational Leadership has recently produced an organisational framework. Based on analysis of the Welsh educational, social and economic context and a scoping of relevant literatures, we suggest six strategies for the development of educational management/leadership for Wales, which aim to address existing deficits and build a distinctive leadership and management approach in Wales: (1) A focus upon using within-school variation (WSV) in schools in Wales as a means of identifying good practice (as Wales has high levels of WSV); (2) A greater focus upon leadership strategies related to classroom pedagogy; (3) Implementing contextually variable leadership/management strategies to address the substantial variability in multiple areas of Welsh society and social structure; (4) Embracing more advanced 'thought leadership' which acknowledges the complexity of enacted leadership; (5) Embracing more productive original thinking drawing from evidence from non-educational areas; and (6) Attending to the reliability of Wales' educational system because system reliability puts a ceiling on system validity.