Access to schooling has expanded across Africa over recent decades, but improvements in learning have lagged.
A 2024 study titled ‘Building consensus on school leadership for quality education in Africa’ examines what effective school leadership looks like across the continent, combining a large body of research with expert opinion to test where there is agreement and where it still falls apart.
The study builds on a scoping review of 227 empirical studies on school leadership in Africa and then subjects those findings to a structured validation process using the Delphi method. A panel of 16 experts, drawn from policy, research and professional development, worked through three rounds of surveys, rating and debating a growing set of statements about leadership, training and policy.
By the second round, experts were assessing 112 statements, and while consensus emerged on many, a significant number remained contested even after a third round of refinement.
Agreement on the fundamentals
What is striking is how much agreement there is on the fundamentals. Across countries and contexts, experts converge on a broad definition of effective school leadership. It is not framed narrowly in terms of test scores, but in terms of student wellbeing, reduced dropout and greater equity, alongside improvements in teaching quality and stronger relationships with communities. The emphasis consistently falls on the conditions for learning rather than on performance metrics alone.
That same pattern holds in how leadership is understood in practice. Effective leaders are expected to set direction, manage the school as an organisation, and create a safe and inclusive learning environment. They are also expected to support teachers through development, motivation and retention, and to build collaborative cultures that extend beyond the school itself.
On professional development, the consensus is equally clear. Training is seen as effective when it is long-term, grounded in practice, and built around a mix of mentoring, peer learning and on-the-job experience. There is also strong agreement that development programmes need to address issues of gender and equity, and that they work best when there is coordination between governments and providers.
Points of disagreement
But the study is as much about disagreement as it is about agreement. Some of the most familiar themes in global education debates do not translate cleanly across contexts. There is, for example, no consensus on whether the use of ICT should be considered a core leadership practice, with experts citing uneven infrastructure across countries. Similarly, there is disagreement over whether school leaders should play a role in redesigning curricula, with some arguing that this sits beyond their mandate.
Gender is another area where the picture is mixed. While there is agreement that more women are needed in leadership roles, there is no consensus on whether women lead differently or more effectively than men. The same applies to the idea of Ubuntu leadership. Although often cited as a potential African leadership model, experts disagree on whether it constitutes a distinct or continent-wide approach.
The policy landscape adds a further layer of complexity. Experts agree that national policies play an important role in shaping leadership and raising its profile, and that district-level actors are central to how systems function in practice. Yet there is no shared view on how much autonomy schools should have, particularly in debates around decentralisation.
Taken together, the findings point to a field that is beginning to stabilise around a shared set of core ideas, particularly the centrality of teaching quality, equity and school culture, but remains unsettled in how these ideas should be implemented across diverse national systems.
The conclusion is a qualified one. There is now broad agreement on what effective school leadership is meant to do. What remains less clear is how those ambitions translate into practice at scale and how systems with very different constraints and capacities can move in the same direction.
