ABSTRACT
The first of our five Leadership for Learning principles we called ‘a focus on learning’. It was a first principle not simply in a numerical sense but because everything else rests on this foundation. This principle, we might claim, was owed to an empirical grounding in work with schools, derived from our conversations with headteachers, teachers and school students in seven countries, but that would be a misleading gloss on what actually occurs in the interaction between research teams and schools. However grounded our theories, we always bring to them insights and theories, some well developed, some embryonic in character and what may be termed as propositional knowledge.
