What does the research tell us about leadership and international education?

Data are crucial to school improvement and school leaders play a critical role in identifying reliable and meaningful data. The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) has worked with schools and education systems around the world on school and system improvement for more than a decade and developed a suite of practical and effective evidence-based tools to use in this work. These tools are underpinned by evidence from research into the practices of highly effective schools, school leaders and education systems internationally, and our work has afforded us the opportunity to work with and collect evidence from hundreds of schools, and thousands of school leaders and teachers, in Australia and globally. The evidence gathered has enabled us to identify commonalities across incredibly diverse country contexts and, in turn, to make recommendations that are effective in a range of educational environments. It is the kind of critical evidence school leaders need when making decisions about improvement initiatives, and when measuring their impact