50 Remarkable Thought Leaders on School Leadership in the Middle East and Africa

Last updated: June 2026

The most important voices in school leadership in the Middle East and Africa right now are the principals building Outstanding-rated schools from scratch in Dubai, the researchers designing the first continent-wide school leadership frameworks in Nairobi, and the Nigerian educators creating coaching programmes that are reaching hundreds of school leaders at once. As of June 2026, this list profiles 50 of those people, drawn from the Gulf states, the Levant, and sub-Saharan Africa, because they deserve to be as well known in global school leadership conversations as any voice from the UK or the United States.

School leadership in these two regions is not one story. The Gulf states, particularly the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, are home to some of the most internationally competitive private school markets anywhere in the world, with KHDA and ADEK inspection frameworks that hold schools to rigorous external standards and a pace of expansion that requires leaders who can build strong cultures quickly. Africa's story is different: a continent where the African Centre for School Leadership recently secured the largest known investment in school leadership research ever made on the continent, where governments at the 2025 ADEA Triennale in Accra named school leadership as a continental education priority, and where leaders like Abimbola Ogundere in Nigeria are building coaching programmes that reach school leaders in fifteen states simultaneously. Both regions are producing school leadership thinkers and practitioners that the global conversation has been too slow to recognise.

This list was compiled to surface the leaders who genuinely deserve to be just as well known as any of the voices that appear on every global education list. Rather than recycling the same handful of household names from the United Kingdom or North America, the goal was to find the practitioners running exceptional schools, the researchers producing the most relevant work for these specific contexts, and the system builders whose frameworks are reshaping how school leadership is understood and developed across the region. Selection criteria prioritised verifiable current roles, documented recent output, original thinking rather than reshared content, and active engagement with the challenges specific to school leadership in these regions.

The people on this list range from a principal who has led the same school to multiple Outstanding inspection ratings to a UNESCO specialist who founded the network that connected technology to African schools across 16 countries. They include the CEO of the body representing 184 British international schools across the Middle East, a Nigerian doctor who became one of the most prolific school leadership coaches in sub-Saharan Africa, and a Qatari professor whose 2026 cross-national study on teacher leadership across six Arab countries is already shaping how ministries think about distributed leadership in MENA schools.

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Why Does School Leadership in the Middle East and Africa Matter?

School leadership is the single most important in-school variable after classroom teaching in determining student outcomes. Research from Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria consistently shows that school leadership quality correlates directly with learning outcomes, and that leaders who lack instructional focus consistently preside over weaker teaching practices regardless of school resources. In the Middle East and Africa context, this finding carries particular weight because both regions are in periods of rapid educational transformation that demand exceptional leadership.

The Gulf states have built some of the most internationally competitive school sectors in the world in a remarkably short period. The UAE alone is home to more than 250 international schools in Dubai, operating under inspection frameworks that judge schools against Outstanding, Very Good, Good, and Acceptable ratings. Schools that achieve or sustain Outstanding ratings in this environment are not doing so by accident. They are led by people with deep expertise in school improvement, teacher development, and the specific cultural dynamics of educating internationally diverse student communities in a rapidly developing national context.

Africa's story is in some ways the more urgent one. The African Centre for School Leadership recently committed $865,000 in its first cohort of research grants, described as the largest known investment in school leadership research ever made on the continent. The 2025 ADEA Triennale in Accra saw African ministers and senior policymakers formally name school leadership evidence generation as a continental priority for the coming decade. That political signal, backed by money going directly to doctoral researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and senior research fellows across 14 African countries, represents a genuine inflection point.

For school leadership teams wanting to translate these ideas into changed practice, Jonno White's facilitation and keynote work offers a practical bridge. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. To explore what is possible, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, a documented current role and recent output in school leadership in the Middle East, Africa, or both. Second, active and original engagement with the specific challenges of school leadership in these regions rather than general leadership content. Third, a deliberate effort to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered, moving past the household names that appear on every global education list. The list spans practitioners leading exceptional schools, researchers producing the most contextually relevant work, and system builders whose frameworks are reshaping how school leadership is understood across both regions. Geographic and disciplinary diversity was a design goal throughout.

Category 1: Leading International Schools in the UAE and Gulf

The UAE and broader Gulf region operates some of the world's most internationally competitive private and international schools. The leaders in this category are running these schools at the highest level, consistently achieving Outstanding inspection ratings and building cultures that attract and retain strong teachers in a high-demand, high-turnover market. The defining challenge for school leaders in this context is building genuine school culture across a student body that may represent 80 or more nationalities, with a teacher workforce drawn globally, within an inspection framework that holds schools to very high external standards.

1. Nargish Khambatta

As Principal and CEO of GEMS Modern Academy and Senior Vice-President of GEMS Education, Nargish Khambatta has spent more than 34 years building one of the most recognised Indian-curriculum school leadership careers in the Gulf. Her school serves a student community drawn from the Indian diaspora in Dubai, and under her leadership GEMS Modern Academy has grown into an internationally accredited institution recognised by Cognia, the British Council, and Cambridge International Assessments, serving more than 2,000 students.

The credential that distinguishes Khambatta in the regional conversation is not her title but her philosophy. She has presented at international positive psychology in education conferences in the United States, China, and Australia, and her consistent articulation of what it means to build a culture where every child discovers their worth and their passion has made her one of the most referenced voices on humane, purposeful leadership in the Gulf's private school sector. Her 2018 GEMS Exceptional Head of School Award, the first ever given by the group, recognised what her peers had observed for years.

2. Mark Leppard MBE

Mark Leppard MBE is the Headmaster of The British School Al Khubairat in Abu Dhabi, the only British curriculum Embassy School of the UAE, and one of the most consistently recognised school leaders in the region. He has led schools in the Middle East for more than 26 years, beginning at Doha College in Qatar before joining BSAK in 2015, and has led institutions to multiple Outstanding inspection ratings during that span.

What makes Leppard a genuine thought leader rather than simply an excellent practitioner is his willingness to engage publicly with the hard questions facing international school leadership in the Gulf. He writes regularly on education, appears on panels including as a panellist for the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund, and has spoken candidly about the consequences of inconsistent UK exam board communication for British curriculum schools abroad. His focus on placing students at the heart of every decision, and his specific articulation of holistic education as the foundation rather than the supplement of a strong school, has made him one of the most sought-after voices at regional leadership conferences.

3. Debra Forsyth

As CEO of BSME, British Schools in the Middle East, Debra Forsyth leads the regional association that represents 184 British international schools across the Gulf and wider Middle East region. Her role gives her a systems-level view of school leadership challenges that no individual principal can have, and she uses it actively. In March 2026, she coordinated BSME's joint submission with COBIS, HMC, and AoBSO to UK exam boards on behalf of schools affected by regional conflict, demanding better communication with school communities facing chronic stress and disrupted learning conditions.

Forsyth's contribution to the regional conversation on school leadership extends well beyond advocacy. She has been a central figure in the British International Schools Safeguarding Coalition, launched in November 2023 to establish shared standards for child protection across British international schools globally. Her ability to translate individual school leadership challenges into systemic pressure for improved standards makes her one of the most influential people in the Gulf school leadership ecosystem.

4. Dr Neil Hopkin

Dr Neil Hopkin is Director of Education at Fortes Education in Dubai, a role that gives him oversight of a group of schools and a platform for some of the most substantive public thinking on AI and educational leadership anywhere in the Middle East's private school market. His blog, his LinkedIn content, and his appearances at the Dubai Learning Summit have established him as the clearest voice in the Gulf on what it actually means to govern AI responsibly in schools rather than reacting to it reactively.

His paper arguing that effective AI governance requires widespread AI literacy, and exploring the global disparities in both governance frameworks and literacy initiatives with an emphasis on inclusive and adaptable strategies, is the kind of thinking that moves a field rather than just comments on it. For school leaders in the Middle East navigating the AI question without the institutional support that larger systems in the West provide, Hopkin's work is practically indispensable.

5. Simon O'Connor

Simon O'Connor is Executive Principal of Harrow International Schools UAE, appointed by Taaleem in July 2025 to lead the launch of Harrow International School Dubai and Harrow International School Abu Dhabi, both opening in 2026. He brings 25 years of experience leading Outstanding-rated schools in the UAE, including seven years as Principal of Jumeirah College and a subsequent period as Director of Deira International School and Chief Education Officer for the Al Futtaim Education Foundation.

The specific contribution O'Connor makes to the regional conversation is on how educational culture scales across brand extensions. His experience steering two very different institutions to Outstanding ratings, and now leading the founding of two new Harrow campuses simultaneously, gives him one of the broadest perspectives on sustainable school improvement in the Gulf. His doctorate research at the University of Buckingham, examining how organisational culture drives school improvement, connects his practice directly to an emerging evidence base.

6. Kausor Amin-Ali

Kausor Amin-Ali is Principal of Frontline International Private School in Ajman, a well-regarded British-curriculum school with a predominantly South Asian and Middle Eastern diaspora community. His engagement at regional conferences and his active production of school leadership writing on LinkedIn have established him as a useful voice on the practical questions of curriculum leadership, teacher development, and building learning-focused cultures in the Gulf's mid-range private school market.

His specific contribution to the regional conversation is grounded in the day-to-day realities of leading a school where community expectations, parental engagement styles, and cultural values around learning create a distinctive leadership context that leaders trained in UK or US systems often find genuinely challenging. His chapter on the UAE in the academic volume on international education systems extends his thinking into the scholarly conversation. His doctoral research at the University of Birmingham on pathways to headship in English state-funded schools adds a comparative dimension that enriches his practice.

Category 2: School System Architects and Policy Voices Across the Middle East

School leadership in the broader Middle East context is shaped not only by individual principals but by the policy frameworks, inspection regimes, and system-level thinkers who set the parameters within which school leaders operate. This category profiles people working at the intersection of policy, research, and practice across the region. The most important contribution this group is making is to the question of what school leadership looks like in Arab and Gulf contexts on its own terms, rather than as a derivative of imported Western models.

7. Professor Norma Ghamrawi

Norma Ghamrawi is a Full Professor of Education at the College of Education, Qatar University, and one of the most active researchers in the MENA region on school leadership, teacher leadership, and distributed leadership in Arab school contexts. Her 2026 cross-national study examining how teacher leadership influences distributed leadership across six Arab countries, with teacher wellbeing positioned as a central mediating factor, represents the kind of empirically grounded, contextually specific research that the school leadership field in the region has needed for years.

Her 2023 policy review of school leadership in the State of Qatar, framed within UNESCO's Agenda 2030 goals, examined the degree to which Qatari regulatory frameworks supported distributed and instructional leadership, the professional development offered to school leaders, and the appraisal scheme for school leaders. For any school leader or policymaker in the Gulf wanting to understand what the evidence says about how their system measures up, Ghamrawi's work is the most rigorous starting point available.

8. Dr Suleiman Hamdan

Dr Suleiman Hamdan is a School Improvement Advisor at the Sharjah Private Education Authority, a role that places him directly at the intersection of school leadership practice and system-level improvement in one of the UAE's most significant educational authorities. His advisory work with school leaders across Sharjah's private school network gives him an unusually wide view of what the practical challenges of school leadership look like across different types of schools in the emirate.

His engagement at regional leadership conferences has focused on the practical dimensions of school improvement planning, school self-evaluation, and the specific leadership behaviours that separate schools that improve consistently from those that plateau. For school leaders working within UAE private education authority frameworks, his perspective on what inspectors and advisors are actually looking for in school culture and leadership practice is one of the most directly useful available.

9. Nick Hart

Nick Hart is Principal of Horizon English School in Dubai, a long-established institution that has maintained both KHDA ratings and a strong community reputation across multiple leadership transitions. His engagement with the Middle East school leadership community through conferences and his active reflection on the challenges of building instructional leadership in complex multi-cultural school environments have made him a respected voice among Dubai's principal community.

His specific contribution to the regional conversation is a clear-eyed approach to the gap between aspiring for outstanding teaching and building the leadership structures that actually produce it. The distinction between having a vision for great teaching and creating the conditions where teachers consistently achieve it is one that many school leaders struggle to bridge, and Hart's public reflections on how to close that gap are genuinely useful.

10. Glen Radojkovich

As Director of Education at Taaleem Education, Glen Radojkovich oversees educational quality and leadership development across one of the UAE's most significant school group operators. Taaleem runs a diverse portfolio of schools across Dubai, including the Dubai Schools public-private partnership network, which means Radojkovich's decisions about school leadership development affect both the international and local school communities in ways that most individual principals cannot reach.

His engagement with the Middle East school leadership community at regional conferences has focused on the systems and structures that allow school leaders to function effectively within large multi-school groups. The question of how educational values survive organisational scale is one of the most important in the Gulf right now, and his thinking on it is among the most practically grounded available.

11. Rebecca Coulter

Rebecca Coulter is Principal of Dubai British School Jumeirah Park, one of the flagship schools in the Taaleem portfolio. Her engagement at MESLC 2025 and her visible presence in the regional school leadership community reflect a career that has combined strong school improvement practice with genuine willingness to share what has worked and what has not. Dubai British School's reputation for community and culture sits alongside strong academic outcomes, and the balance she maintains between those two dimensions is a model for how international schools in the Gulf can avoid the trap of prioritising results over relationships.

Her particular contribution is on the question of what community actually means for a school that draws families from dozens of national backgrounds, and how school leaders build genuine belonging rather than surface-level diversity in those conditions.

12. Fiona Cottam

Fiona Cottam is Principal of Hartland International School in Dubai, a school that has established itself as one of the leading IB-curriculum institutions in the UAE market. Her leadership of a school that runs the full IB continuum from Primary Years through Diploma Programme involves unique challenges around curriculum coherence, teacher development across multiple programme frameworks, and maintaining a consistent school culture across a complex educational structure.

Her active engagement with the Dubai school leadership community and her willingness to reflect publicly on the specific challenges of IB leadership in a high-demand market have made her a relevant voice for any school leader working within or considering the IB framework in the Middle East context. The IB continuum is demanding to lead well, and schools that do it well are a genuine minority.

13. Emma Shanahan

Emma Shanahan is a school leader who served as Principal of Aspen Heights British School in Dubai during its growth phase as part of the International Schools Partnership portfolio. Her engagement at MESLC 2025 focused on the leadership challenge of building a strong school identity in a new institution, one of the most demanding situations in school leadership anywhere but particularly in the UAE, where new schools open every year and families make rapid judgements about whether an institution is worth their investment.

Her thinking on how founding and early-stage principals build culture deliberately rather than by accident, and how they sustain it as the school scales, is directly relevant to the dozens of new school openings in Dubai and Abu Dhabi every year. The number of school leaders who have to build culture from nothing is growing, and the body of practical knowledge about how to do it well is thin.

Category 3: African School Leadership Researchers and System Builders

Africa's school leadership research and policy infrastructure has historically been underdeveloped relative to the continent's scale and need. That is changing, and the people driving that change are producing some of the most important school leadership thinking anywhere in the world. This category profiles the researchers, policy architects, and system builders who are building the knowledge base and practical frameworks that African school leadership has been missing.

14. Dr Abimbola Ogundere

Dr Abimbola Ogundere is a Global Education Leadership Expert, School Leadership Coach, author, and Founder and CEO of Kids' Court School and Court Hill College in Lagos, Nigeria, and of the LAIT Foundation, Africa. Her breadth is unusual: a medical doctor with separate Masters degrees in Public Health and Applied Educational Leadership from the University of London, she has built two internationally accredited schools from the ground up while simultaneously creating one of the most significant school leader professional development programmes in West Africa.

The SALLC (Succeeding at Leading a Learning Community) executive coaching programme, which she launched in January 2020, has reached more than 200 school leaders across 15 states in Nigeria. Her books include The Complete Guide to Succeeding at School Leadership and Leadership for Wellbeing in Schools. For school leaders in sub-Saharan Africa who have been underserved by the Western-dominated school leadership development industry, her work represents a genuinely African voice on genuinely African challenges.

15. Shafika Isaacs

Shafika Isaacs is Chief of Section for Technology and AI in Education at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and the Founding Executive Director of SchoolNet Africa, the organisation that pioneered technology integration in schools across 16 African countries. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Johannesburg, where she also serves as Professor of Practice, and has contributed to UNESCO's AI Competency Framework for Teachers and advised UNICEF on AI and children.

Her significance for school leadership in Africa is structural. SchoolNet Africa built the connective tissue that allowed African schools to participate in the digital learning conversation at a time when the continent's schools were being excluded from it by infrastructure gaps and resource constraints. Her current work at UNESCO on AI competency for teachers, and her ongoing research on AI in African primary education systems, means she is now shaping the next phase of that conversation.

16. Dr Chinaza Uleanya

Dr Chinaza Uleanya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education Leadership and Management at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and one of the most prolific researchers in Africa on school leadership challenges specific to the continent. His 2025 paper in Leadership and Policy in Schools, co-authored with Dr Suraiya Naicker, examining future-fit and innovative school leadership in the African context, addressed directly what sustainable school leadership looks like when the conditions assumed by most global school leadership research do not apply.

His research on persistent African school leadership problems, on postdigital leadership in education, and on the specific challenges of leading schools in under-resourced rural contexts has been cited more than 1,370 times according to Google Scholar, making him one of the most referenced education leadership researchers in sub-Saharan Africa. His willingness to name what is not working in African school leadership systems, rather than offering optimistic framing, gives his work a particular usefulness for practitioners who need honest diagnosis.

17. Etienne Ntawigira

Etienne Ntawigira is a research practitioner at the African Centre for School Leadership (ACSL), coordinated by VVOB in partnership with organisations across Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, and a growing number of additional African countries. His work on school leadership country mapping exercises, completed in Kenya, Zambia, Ghana, and Rwanda, has produced the most systematic comparative picture of school leadership policy, professional development, and practice available for any African country.

His 2024 practice brief on evidence-based insights for providers of school leadership professional development in Africa is the most useful synthesis currently available for anyone designing school leader training for an African context. For school improvement advisors, government officials, and NGO practitioners working on school leadership across the continent, Ntawigira's output is required reading.

18. Dr Leslie Casely-Hayford

Dr Leslie Casely-Hayford is a social development consultant and Director at Associates for Change in Ghana, with 30 years of research and policy implementation experience. She serves as a trusted advisor to Ghana's Parliament on education sector analysis and leads major multi-country research projects focused on equitable education financing and scaling pedagogical innovations in fragile or crisis-affected settings.

Her contribution to the African school leadership conversation is on the equity and access dimensions that many school leadership frameworks treat as peripheral but that are central to any honest account of what leadership means in African school contexts. For school leaders in Ghana and across West Africa navigating the intersection of national education policy and day-to-day school management, her perspective combines the evidential rigour of a serious researcher with the policy literacy of someone who has worked directly with government.

19. Hatim Eltayeb

Hatim Eltayeb is CEO of the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, one of Africa's most significant institutions for developing the next generation of ethical and entrepreneurial leaders. A Sudanese national educated at Harvard University, he joined ALA in 2009 as a founding faculty member, led the Academy's Diploma Program as Dean from 2016 to 2022, and was appointed Chief Executive in September 2022 following a global search. His earlier founding of Symposium, a school services company whose core product served 15 leading independent schools in Cairo, gives him a rare combination of school-level pedagogical depth and institution-building breadth.

The African Leadership Academy's model is distinctive in the school leadership landscape because it treats leadership development as the explicit purpose of the school rather than a byproduct. ALA identifies high-potential students from across the continent, develops them through a rigorous two-year pre-university programme, and connects them into a continental network of alumni who are now leading in business, government, and civil society across Africa. For school leaders thinking seriously about how to build leadership capacity within their own institutions, ALA's approach represents one of the most seriously developed practical frameworks available anywhere on the continent.

20. Maina Mwangi

Maina Mwangi is Director of Teach For Kenya and one of the most prominent voices on secondary school leadership and equity in East Africa. Teach For Kenya works with secondary schools in underserved communities, and his work addresses directly the intersection of school leadership, teacher quality, and the particular challenges of educating students in contexts of resource scarcity.

His perspective on what good school leadership looks like when resources are genuinely scarce challenges the Western assumption that school improvement is primarily a question of leadership skill applied to adequate resources. For school leaders across East Africa and for anyone working with schools in low-income contexts globally, his thinking provides a necessary corrective to frameworks that were designed for better-resourced environments.

Category 4: Women Leading School Change in the Middle East and Africa

Women school leaders in both regions navigate additional complexity: in the Gulf, they often work within institutional cultures that have historically been male-dominated at senior levels; in Africa, research consistently shows that women principals are underrepresented despite evidence that they perform as strongly as or stronger than their male counterparts. The leaders in this category are not simply women who have succeeded in school leadership, they are people whose specific perspective on leadership has shaped the conversation in their regions.

21. Saima Rana

Dr Saima Rana is Principal and CEO of GEMS World Academy Dubai, a school that has built one of the strongest reputations in the UAE's international school market. Recognised as joint winner of the Best Principal and Head of School in the UAE award in 2023-2024 by SchoolsCompared.com, she is a visible and credentialled voice in the regional school leadership community.

Her contribution to the conversation on women's leadership in Gulf schools is practical rather than theoretical: she is demonstrating through the quality and culture of the school she leads what is achievable. For school leaders in the Gulf looking at what principled, outcomes-focused leadership looks like at the highest level of the market, her track record is one of the clearest reference points available.

22. Amy Falhi

Amy Falhi is the Founding Principal of Dubai British School Mira, which means she has navigated the challenge of building a school community from scratch in one of Dubai's newest residential developments. Founding principalship is one of the most demanding forms of school leadership, requiring leaders to establish culture, build teams, and create community simultaneously while managing the inevitable tensions of a new institution finding its identity.

Her presence at MESLC 2025 and her engagement with other UAE school leaders on the specific challenges of founding a school have made her a useful voice for any leader facing similar challenges. In a market where new schools continue to open every year, the body of practical knowledge about how to found a school well is genuinely thin, and Falhi is building it through her own experience.

23. Dr Tonia Williams

Dr Tonia Williams is Principal of Future International School in Dubai and a speaker at MESLC 2025 whose engagement focused on the intersection of personal development and school leadership effectiveness. Her work on how leaders manage their own wellbeing, time, and purpose in a high-pressure school leadership environment addresses a challenge that is poorly served by the technical focus of most school leadership content.

Her perspective on the human dimensions of principalship, and particularly on how leaders build the internal resources to sustain exceptional performance over time, is increasingly relevant as burnout and leadership pipeline issues become serious concerns in the Gulf's school sector. The number of experienced school leaders leaving the UAE market prematurely is not primarily a recruitment problem; it is a sustainability problem.

24. Philippa Wraithmell

Philippa Wraithmell is the Founder of EdRuption, a consultancy and community dedicated to innovating education in the Middle East. Her engagement with the UAE school leadership community sits at the intersection of school improvement, educational innovation, and the specific challenges of introducing pedagogical change in contexts where parental and regulatory expectations are high and tolerance for experimentation is limited.

Her work on how school leaders build the conditions for genuine innovation within constrained institutional environments is one of the more distinctive contributions to the regional conversation. For school leaders who have been told to innovate without being given the structural permission or practical support to do so, her thinking offers a framework for navigating that contradiction productively.

25. Dr Ashkelon Govender

Dr Ashkelon Govender is Deputy Head of Primary at GEMS Wellington School in the UAE and a speaker at MESLC 2025 whose engagement focused on the leadership of inclusion and special educational needs within the Gulf's private school sector. His dual background as a South African educator working in the UAE gives him a perspective that bridges two of the regions covered by this list.

His work on what inclusive leadership looks like in practice, and on how school leaders build the specific expertise and team structures that genuine inclusion requires, is particularly relevant in a Gulf context where KHDA and ADEK inspection frameworks have become increasingly rigorous about inclusion standards. The gap between schools that meet inclusion benchmarks and schools that have built genuinely inclusive cultures is large, and Govender is one of the clearest voices on how to close it.

26. Jacqueline Doran-McGuinness

As Principal of King's College Riyadh, Jacqueline Doran-McGuinness took up the leadership of one of the first British independent schools to open in Saudi Arabia through a direct partnership with a UK institution, effective August 2025. Her appointment followed more than seven years in senior leadership roles at premium British-curriculum schools in the UAE, including a recent tenure at Aldar Education in Abu Dhabi, and brings a cross-regional perspective to her Saudi context.

Her contribution to the regional conversation is particularly valuable on the question of how leadership teams communicate across cultural and professional boundaries in schools that employ teachers from dozens of different national backgrounds. Her move to Riyadh places her at the centre of one of the most rapidly changing school markets in the Gulf, where new British and international school partnerships are reshaping the landscape at pace.

27. Tracy Crowder-Cloe

Tracy Crowder-Cloe is an accomplished school leader who is leaving Cranleigh Abu Dhabi after three years to take up the Principal role at Repton Abu Dhabi from the start of the 2026-2027 academic year. Her leadership of Cranleigh Abu Dhabi, a school that must honour the heritage and values of a 150-year-old English institution while building culture appropriate to a genuinely international community, has demonstrated that flagship international school brand extension in the Gulf is possible without cultural dilution.

Her work on how international school brands translate their identities across different national contexts has been taken up by other school leaders navigating similar challenges. Her transition to Repton Abu Dhabi, returning to the school family where she served as Vice Principal and Head of Senior School before joining Cranleigh, will allow her to bring that cross-institutional knowledge to a new founding chapter.

Category 5: Education Researchers Shaping School Leadership Practice

Academic research on school leadership in the Middle East and Africa has historically either followed global frameworks without adequate contextualisation or has been too narrowly local to influence broader practice. The researchers in this category are the ones bridging that gap, producing work that is simultaneously rigorous and relevant to the specific conditions of school leadership in these regions.

28. Professor Tony Bush

Professor Tony Bush is Emeritus Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Nottingham and one of the most cited researchers in the global school leadership field, with particular expertise in Africa and the Middle East. His comparative research on school leadership preparation and development in Africa was one of the first systematic examinations of how the assumptions embedded in global school leadership frameworks do or do not hold in African contexts.

His research documented that the orthodoxy of school leadership preparation in countries like Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa reflects inherited thinking from the global North that does not always fit African school realities, and that genuinely contextual school leadership frameworks are still being built. His work remains the most-cited foundation for anyone researching school leadership in Africa.

29. Tope Adenuga

Tope Adenuga is CEO of The Faculty Company and the designer of the School Leadership Masterclass, a pan-African initiative that toured Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Accra, and Nairobi in April-May 2026. He holds a Master's degree in Educational Leadership and Management from Anglia Ruskin University and has more than 15 years of experience spanning teaching, school leadership, and educational consulting across Nigeria and the United Kingdom.

He is the author of Million Dollar Teachers and Raising a Book Smart Kid, two books that have shaped conversations among educators and parents across Africa. His School Leadership Masterclass represents one of the first attempts to bring high-quality school leadership professional development to multiple African cities simultaneously, acknowledging that the geographic concentration of most African leadership development in capital cities has left school leaders in secondary cities significantly underserved.

30. Dr Steffen Sommer

Dr Steffen Sommer is Director General of Misk Schools in Saudi Arabia, having joined from Doha College in Qatar where he was Principal for seven years. He brings more than 25 years of educational leadership experience across Europe and the Middle East, and his specific expertise in High Performance Learning gives him a distinctive pedagogical framework that shapes how he approaches school leadership practice.

Misk Schools operates under the Misk Foundation, connected to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's vision for Saudi education, which means Sommer's leadership context is one of the most consequential in the region. His work on embedding High Performance Learning within a Saudi school context, and on what international school leadership expertise transfers to and from a rapidly reforming national school system, is among the most interesting work in the Gulf right now.

31. Russel Ellicott

Russel Ellicott joined Misk Schools in January 2025 as Boys' Schools Principal, bringing a track record that includes leading Pate's Grammar School in Cheltenham to two Sunday Times National Secondary School of the Year awards, the only school to ever receive that distinction twice. He holds a Master's in Education with Distinction from the University of London and is a fully accredited executive leadership coach.

His engagement with the Saudi school leadership context, and specifically with the challenge of bringing evidence-based school improvement thinking into a system that is simultaneously ambitious and in rapid transition, makes him one of the most interesting new voices in Middle East school leadership. His background in coaching means his perspective on leadership development within schools adds a dimension that many principalship-only voices lack.

32. Dr Suraiya Naicker

Dr Suraiya Naicker is a researcher in the Department of Education Leadership and Management at the University of Johannesburg, and co-author of the 2025 paper on future-fit and innovative school leadership in the African context alongside Chinaza Uleanya. Her work specifically addresses leadership for sustainability in underdeveloped and developing country contexts.

Her research on what sustainable leadership means when infrastructure constraints and governance challenges are permanent features of the school environment rather than temporary obstacles challenges the assumptions embedded in most sustainability-framed school leadership literature. The frameworks she is developing are the ones that African school leaders actually need, not the ones designed for systems where the basics are already in place.

33. Dr Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg

Dr Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg is Executive Director of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development and one of the most influential voices on girls' education and educational equity in sub-Saharan Africa. Her work on the systemic barriers that prevent girls from accessing quality secondary schooling, and on what school leadership needs to address to change those outcomes, makes her directly relevant to any school leader thinking seriously about equity in African school contexts.

Her perspective connects school leadership practice to the wider social and economic contexts that determine whether girls can actually benefit from the schools that leadership teams are building and improving. For school leaders working in rural or under-resourced communities across East and Central Africa, her framing of what equity requires of school leadership is one of the most practically demanding and useful available.

34. Dr Kehinde Nwani

Dr Kehinde Nwani is a school leadership coach, speaker, and author in Nigeria whose work on women's leadership in education has combined advocacy, professional development, and school improvement consulting. Her nation-building initiatives and her work connecting women in school leadership roles across Nigerian states have created a community of practice that has no equivalent elsewhere in the country.

Her contribution is particularly significant in a context where women school principals in Nigeria face cultural barriers that would not be recognised as legitimate in the global school leadership literature but are very real in practice. Her ability to support women school leaders through those barriers while simultaneously improving the quality of leadership in the schools they lead represents a dual contribution to the Nigerian education sector.

Category 6: Association Leaders and School Sector Builders

The school leadership ecosystem in the Middle East and Africa is shaped not only by individual school leaders and researchers but by the association leaders, network builders, and sector architects who create the conditions in which thousands of school leaders develop. This category profiles people operating at that system level, whose decisions and frameworks affect the entire landscape rather than one school at a time.

35. Justin Reynolds

Justin Reynolds is Middle School Principal at GEMS Dubai American Academy, an established institution in Dubai's international school market. His engagement at MESLC 2025 and his visible participation in the regional school leadership community reflect a career spent building strong middle school cultures in a market where the transition years often receive the least leadership attention relative to their importance.

His specific contribution is on the leadership of the middle years, which in international school contexts in the Gulf involves managing students who are simultaneously navigating adolescence, cultural transition, and the social pressures of expatriate communities. The quality of leadership in those years has a disproportionate effect on student outcomes at IGCSE and IB Diploma level, and Reynolds's focus on getting it right is genuinely important and genuinely underrepresented.

36. Andrew Jenkins

Andrew Jenkins is Associate Principal at GEMS Wellington International School, one of the flagship British curriculum schools in Dubai. His career at one of the UAE's most established school groups gives him visibility into how large school organisations develop their next generation of leaders, a question that is increasingly urgent as the Gulf's school sector expands and the pool of experienced principals available remains constrained.

His engagement with the regional community on the leadership pipeline question and on how schools develop great leaders from within their own teaching staff rather than always recruiting externally is a practical contribution to one of the most persistent challenges in Gulf school leadership. Internal leadership development is significantly more sustainable than external recruitment in a market with high turnover.

37. Daniel McHugh

Daniel McHugh is Headteacher at Al Ain British Academy, a school in the UAE's interior that operates in a very different market context from the Dubai and Abu Dhabi schools that dominate the regional leadership conversation. Al Ain's smaller scale, its more settled community, and its lower profile relative to the flagship schools in the major cities create a school leadership context that is in many ways more representative of how most British curriculum schools in the Gulf actually operate.

His engagement at MESLC 2025 and his willingness to share the realities of leading a school outside the Gulf's most visible markets make his perspective useful for the large number of school leaders whose contexts are similarly unglamorous and similarly important. The majority of school leadership in the Gulf happens in schools like Al Ain British Academy, not in the flagship international schools.

38. Julie Keyes

Julie Keyes is a professional coach known as The Educational Coach, whose work focuses specifically on coaching school leaders in the Middle East. Her specialisation in coaching rather than consultancy positions her differently from most voices in the regional school leadership space: she is not primarily a practitioner sharing what worked in her own school but a coach helping other school leaders find their own answers to their own challenges.

Her engagement with the regional school leadership community through conferences and professional networks has built her a reputation as one of the most practically useful support resources for UAE and Gulf school leaders who are navigating leadership challenges without adequate peer support. The isolation of school leadership in the Gulf is a genuine problem, and coaching is one of the most effective responses to it.

39. Hannah Wilson

Hannah Wilson is Director of Diverse Educators, a UK-based organisation that she has brought into the Middle East school leadership conversation through her engagement with regional conferences including MESLC. Her work on diversity in school leadership, and specifically on how school leaders build inclusive environments for staff as well as students, adds a dimension to the regional conversation that is significantly underrepresented.

Her perspective on what diverse and inclusive school leadership looks like in practice, rather than in principle, is backed by documented examples and genuine engagement with school leaders who are trying to build it. For school leaders in the Gulf managing extraordinarily diverse staff communities, the inclusion question is not abstract.

40. Nadim Saad

Nadim Saad is Founder and Chief Happiness Officer of The Happy Confident Company, an organisation focused on positive psychology, wellbeing, and confidence in school communities. His engagement at MESLC 2025 and his wider work with schools across the Middle East on what wellbeing-centred school leadership looks like in practice add a dimension to the regional conversation that sits between the pastoral and the structural.

His specific contribution is on how school leaders build cultures where student and staff wellbeing are not afterthoughts but design principles, and his positive psychology framework for doing this in school contexts has found a ready audience among UAE and Gulf school leaders who are managing the wellbeing pressures created by high-stakes exam systems and intense parental expectations.

41. Dr Helen Wright

Dr Helen Wright is an Associate at LSC Education and a former school leader whose engagement at MESLC 2025 brought a perspective shaped by experience leading schools in multiple international contexts. Her current advisory work, combined with her background in leading high-performing schools, gives her a dual view as practitioner and consultant that few voices in the Gulf school leadership conversation have.

Her contribution to the regional conversation is on the question of what effective school leadership actually requires at a deep level, not the surface competencies that inspection frameworks measure but the underlying habits of mind, relationship-building capacity, and intellectual honesty that distinguish genuinely excellent school leaders from those who have learned to perform the role well.

42. Joanna Povall

Joanna Povall is Principal of Wales International School, a school whose presence in the UAE market reflects the growing interest in curriculum diversity within the Gulf's private school sector. Her engagement with the regional school leadership community and her work on what a distinctively Welsh educational identity means in an international school context contribute to the broader conversation about how national curriculum brands translate globally.

Her specific contribution is on the challenge of maintaining authentic educational identity in a market where brand differentiation is commercially important but where genuine distinctiveness is harder to build than it appears. For school leaders in the Gulf running schools attached to specific national educational traditions, her practical experience navigating this challenge is directly relevant.

Category 7: Voices from East, West, and Southern Africa

Africa's school leadership conversation is still concentrated in a small number of countries, with South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana together representing most of the published work and visible practitioner community. This category captures voices from across those countries who are doing the most important work, alongside voices from other parts of the continent who are beginning to build the regional infrastructure that the conversation needs.

43. Ferdinand Eruka

Ferdinand Eruka serves as Learning Innovation and Technology Manager at LEAP Africa in Nigeria, an organisation whose school leadership development programmes have reached educators across multiple Nigerian states. His work at the intersection of educational technology, school leadership, and organisational learning brings a perspective that bridges the classroom and the leadership office in ways that most school leadership development programmes struggle to achieve.

His specific contribution is on how school leaders build the capacity within their institutions to use technology effectively for learning, rather than simply acquiring technology. The distinction between having devices and having a learning-focused technology culture in a school is one that he has articulated clearly and practically, and it is a distinction that matters enormously for school leaders in Africa working with significant technology investments and uncertain pedagogical frameworks.

44. Lisa Thorpe

Lisa Thorpe is Deputy Head at Swiss International Private School in Dubai, a school whose curriculum model combines Swiss educational values with the realities of an internationally diverse Dubai school community. Her engagement at MESLC 2025 and her work on building cohesive school leadership cultures in multilingual, multi-curriculum school environments is relevant to the substantial portion of the Gulf school market that operates outside the standard British or American curriculum frameworks.

Her contribution to the regional conversation is on what school leadership looks like when the school itself does not have the benefit of an established curriculum brand to anchor its identity, and when the school community is defined by its multilingual, multicultural character rather than a shared national heritage. These are conditions that many Gulf school leaders face and that the mainstream leadership literature rarely addresses well.

45. Sadia Saba

Sadia Saba is Vice Principal at Al Salam Community School in the UAE, a school with a specifically Emirati community focus that distinguishes it from the more internationally oriented schools that dominate the regional school leadership conversation. Her engagement with regional conferences and her work on what school leadership looks like when the community being served is a national rather than an expatriate community adds a perspective that is significantly underrepresented in the English-language school leadership conversation about the UAE.

Her contribution is on the specific leadership dynamics that arise when the school is genuinely embedded in a local community rather than serving a mobile international population. The skills required to lead those schools are different in important ways, and her experience navigating them is directly useful to the many school leaders in the Gulf whose communities are more settled than the transient international demographic that most school leadership literature assumes.

46. Youlande Biosah

Youlande Biosah is Vice Principal at Al Azm Charter School in the UAE and a speaker at MESLC 2025. Her background and her engagement with the regional school leadership community bring a perspective on school leadership that bridges different national and professional traditions within the Gulf's extraordinarily diverse educator workforce.

Her contribution is on the practical leadership dynamics of managing teams that bring radically different professional traditions, expectations, and cultural backgrounds to the same school environment. Al Azm Charter School serves a specific community and demographic, and the leadership challenges of that context are instructive for anyone working in similar circumstances.

47. Ailish Markey

Ailish Markey is an Educational Consultant at Optech Consulting and a speaker at MESLC 2025 whose work focuses on the operational and strategic dimensions of school leadership support in the Gulf. Her consultancy background gives her a view across multiple schools that individual principals cannot have, and her engagement with the regional school leadership community has focused on the practical operational challenges that consume enormous amounts of principal time without generating equivalent educational value.

Her specific contribution is on helping school leaders distinguish between the operational demands that genuinely require their personal attention and those that can be delegated, systematised, or removed from the principal's agenda entirely. The challenge of protecting leadership time and energy for the work that only the principal can do is one of the most universal and least well-addressed challenges in school leadership, and her practical approach to it is worth attending to.

48. David Lees

David Lees is Principal of Citizens School Dubai, a school whose values-based educational model distinguishes it within the UAE's diverse international school market. His visible engagement with the regional school leadership community and his commitment to leading a school whose identity is built around a specific educational philosophy rather than a curriculum brand or inspection rating reflect a principled approach to school leadership.

His contribution to the regional conversation is on the question of what it means to lead a school with genuine values clarity, where the educational decisions are consistently tested against the same underlying commitments. For school leaders in the Gulf who are trying to build cultures with genuine depth rather than surface-level mission statements, his approach offers a practical model.

49. Dr Emanuel Vincent

Dr Emanuel Vincent is an Education Consultant and speaker whose work focuses on the professional development challenges facing school leaders in the Middle East's international school sector. His engagement at MESLC 2025 focused on what school leaders need that current professional development structures are not providing, which is a more useful framing of the CPD question than most.

His contribution is particularly relevant for school leaders who have found that the professional development available to them in the Gulf has been designed for different contexts and who are trying to find or build something more appropriate to their specific leadership challenges. The gap between what the international school leadership literature recommends and what Gulf school leaders actually need is real, and Vincent is one of the people actively trying to close it.

50. Matt Lecuyer

Matt Lecuyer is Executive Principal and CEO of GEMS Winchester School Dubai, a flagship school in the UAE's competitive private school market. His leadership of a school that carries the heritage of a renowned UK institution into a Gulf context involves the cultural translation challenges that define the most interesting work in Middle East school leadership. His publicly visible engagement with how strong educational culture scales internationally has made him a relevant voice for any school leader working at the intersection of brand heritage and Gulf growth.

His specific contribution to the regional conversation is on how schools built on the credibility of a distant institution develop their own genuine identity rather than existing as franchise operations. The schools that navigate this question well are consistently outperforming those that treat brand association as a substitute for building culture.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several voices were seriously considered for this directory but did not make the final list for specific reasons. A number of practitioners and researchers from the Middle East and Africa were on the longlist but could not be confirmed with sufficient evidence of current roles or recent original output to meet the standard required.

The field of African school leadership research is expanding fast, particularly through the ACSL's research grants programme, which has funded 39 researchers across 14 African countries in its first cohort. Many of those researchers will be prominent voices in this conversation within the next two years, even if their output is not yet at the visibility threshold required for this list. Similarly, the women principals running Outstanding-rated schools across the UAE who do not yet have a public profile beyond their school communities are doing some of the most important school leadership work in the region. Absence of a public platform should not be mistaken for absence of impact.

Common Mistakes School Leaders in These Regions Should Avoid

The most common mistake that school leaders in the Middle East and Africa make is importing frameworks wholesale from the United Kingdom or the United States without interrogating whether those frameworks were designed for the conditions they actually face.

In the Gulf, the most visible version of this mistake is the adoption of UK school improvement models built around multi-year planned change in stable communities, applied to schools where teacher turnover runs at 20 to 30 percent annually, students join and leave mid-year at high rates, and the cultural and regulatory context is genuinely different from anything the UK frameworks were designed to address. Strong school culture in a Gulf international school has to be rebuilt every year. The leaders who recognise this and design accordingly are consistently outperforming those who do not.

In Africa, the most common version of this mistake is the application of school improvement frameworks that assume adequate resource baselines, stable teacher workforces, and functional bureaucratic infrastructure. Chinaza Uleanya's research is direct: persistent African school leadership problems include resource constraints, governance challenges, and leadership preparation systems that are ad hoc and not responsive to actual needs. Applying a framework that assumes those problems are solved when they are not does not accelerate improvement; it misidentifies the problem.

A second common mistake is treating inspection performance as the definition of school quality. In both regions, inspection frameworks are important accountability tools, but they measure what inspectors can observe on a given day against a set of criteria. They do not directly measure school culture, teacher wellbeing over time, or the long-term development trajectories of students. School leaders who optimise for inspection scores rather than for the underlying realities that inspections are trying to measure eventually find that one diverges from the other.

A third mistake, particularly relevant for school leaders new to the Middle East, is misunderstanding the nature of the relationship between school leaders and parents in Gulf international schools. Parental expectations in these markets are often more explicit, more demanding, and more commercially framed than in the school contexts that many Gulf school leaders come from. Leaders who have not developed the specific skills to navigate this relationship typically spend disproportionate time on parent management rather than school improvement.

For school leaders working in Africa, a fourth mistake is treating local context as a limitation rather than a resource. The school leaders in Africa who are producing the best outcomes are typically drawing on contextual knowledge that does not appear in any published framework, combined with technical knowledge drawn from global research. Building the capacity to do both simultaneously is the actual leadership challenge, and it is one that the Western school leadership literature is not equipped to address.

Implementation Guide for School Leaders

The most practical step any school leader can take after reading a list like this is to build a deliberate learning diet from the voices on it rather than consuming content passively. Following someone on LinkedIn is not the same as actually engaging with their thinking. Reading a single article is not the same as understanding a person's framework. The leaders on this list who are producing the most original thinking, including Norma Ghamrawi on teacher leadership in Arab contexts, Abimbola Ogundere on school leader coaching in Nigeria, and Neil Hopkin on AI governance in schools, have been developing those frameworks over years.

For school leaders in the Gulf, the most immediately applicable dimension of this list is the specific expertise on building school culture in high-turnover international school environments. The insight that culture has to be rebuilt deliberately every year, rather than assumed to carry forward from one cohort to the next, changes how you think about induction, about team meetings, about the rituals and artefacts that embody your values. Leaders who treat culture as a renovation project rather than an original build project consistently underperform those who design for continuity from the start.

For school leaders in Africa, the most immediately applicable dimension is the growing body of contextual research that validates approaches that may not appear in mainstream leadership literature. Chinaza Uleanya's work on future-fit leadership in African contexts, Etienne Ntawigira's country mapping reports, and Leslie Casely-Hayford's research on equitable education financing all provide the evidential backing for approaches that experienced African school leaders already know work but have lacked the research support to defend when challenged by policymakers or funders trained in different frameworks.

For any school leadership team wanting to build the internal culture, communication, and accountability structures that allow the best leadership thinking to translate into changed practice, the practical facilitation and Working Genius work that Jonno White provides has helped school leadership teams globally turn aspiration into alignment. For more on leadership development experts who work with school teams specifically, check out my blog post '31 Best Leadership Development Experts for Schools (2026)' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/leadership-development-experts-schools. Reach out to jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what is possible.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes school leadership in the Middle East different from other regions?

School leadership in the Middle East, particularly in the Gulf states, is distinct in several ways. First, the pace of school sector growth is extraordinary, with new schools opening every year in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and across the GCC. Second, inspection frameworks like KHDA in Dubai and ADEK in Abu Dhabi publish ratings that create external accountability at a level that most Western school systems do not have. Third, school leaders in the Gulf typically manage student populations drawn from 50 to 100 nationalities alongside teacher workforces that turn over at high rates, requiring them to rebuild culture annually. Fourth, the specific intersection of Islamic values and beliefs with imported Western leadership models creates genuine philosophical questions about what good school leadership looks like in Arab and Gulf contexts.

What are the main school leadership challenges facing African schools in 2026?

African school leadership faces several interconnected challenges documented by the African Centre for School Leadership's country mapping work. Resource constraints affect what leaders can do with infrastructure and teacher professional development. Leadership preparation programmes across most African countries remain ad hoc and are not responsive to actual leadership needs. Gender mainstreaming in school leadership development is underdeveloped in most national frameworks. And the research base that African policymakers and practitioners need to make evidence-informed decisions about school leadership is still being built, which is why the ACSL's $865,000 research grants programme, funding 39 researchers across 14 African countries, represents such a significant inflection point.

Who are the most important organisations in school leadership development in the Middle East?

The most significant organisations in school leadership development in the Gulf include BSME, representing 184 British international schools and providing professional learning programmes at all career levels. The Middle East School Leadership Conference provides the most focused annual gathering for school leaders from across the region. KHDA in Dubai and ADEK in Abu Dhabi set the inspection standards that shape what school leaders develop. Individual school groups including GEMS Education, Taaleem, Aldar Education, and the International Schools Partnership also provide internal leadership development at scale.

How does school leadership research in Africa compare to global research?

School leadership research in Africa has historically been underrepresented relative to the continent's scale, and much of it has followed global frameworks developed in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Tony Bush's comparative work identified that the orthodoxy of school leadership preparation programmes in countries like Kenya and South Africa reflects a global North inheritance that does not always fit African contexts. The African Centre for School Leadership's research grants programme, funding 39 researchers across 14 African countries in 2026, represents the most significant recent investment in building a contextually valid body of knowledge specifically for Africa.

How can international school leaders best prepare for roles in the Middle East?

Leaders preparing for school leadership roles in the Middle East benefit most from direct engagement with the regional community before taking up a role. The Middle East School Leadership Conference, BSME professional development events, and GESS all provide genuine insight into the regional context from practitioners who have built their careers there. Understanding the specific inspection frameworks of the emirate or country where you will be working, engaging with the cultural dimensions of leading diverse international communities, and connecting with experienced leaders already in the region are all more valuable than any preparation course designed outside it.

Final Thoughts

The school leadership conversation in the Middle East and Africa is no longer secondary to the conversations happening in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Australia. The Gulf states are operating some of the most internationally watched school systems in the world, under inspection frameworks that are in some ways more rigorous than those of the countries whose curriculum models they have adopted. Africa is building, for the first time, a systematic body of research on school leadership that is genuinely African in its framing and genuinely useful to the people leading schools under African conditions.

The 50 people on this list represent the current state of that conversation, which is to say they represent both its extraordinary strengths and its genuine gaps. The Middle East section is heavier on practitioners than on researchers because the practitioner community is more visible and more active on the platforms where this research found them. The Africa section is heavier on researchers and system builders than on individual school principals because the individual practitioner community at the principal level is less visible on international platforms, even though the work being done in schools across Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and Rwanda is as important as anything happening in any school in the Gulf. That visibility gap is itself a leadership opportunity.

For the school leadership teams in these regions who want to build the internal culture, communication, and accountability structures that allow great ideas to translate into changed outcomes for students, the facilitation and keynote work that Jonno White delivers is available globally. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs less than engaging high-profile local providers. Whether virtual or face to face, reach out to jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on the thought leaders shaping secondary education globally, check out my blog post '50 Essential Thought Leaders in Secondary Education (2026)' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-secondary-education.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Research evidence from Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria on the relationship between school leadership quality and learning outcomes.

African Centre for School Leadership (2026). ACSL commits $865,000 in cohort 1 school leadership research grants. Retrieved from africancentreforschoolleadership.org.

African Centre for School Leadership (2025). ADEA Triennale, Accra: School leadership evidence generation as continental priority.

Ghamrawi, N., Shal, T., Dahhan, M.L., and Ghamrawi, N.A.R. (2026). The silent emotional engine: Wellbeing at the core of teacher leadership. International Journal of Wellbeing, Vol. 16 No. 1.

Ghamrawi, N. (2023). Toward agenda 2030 in education: policies and practices for effective school leadership in Qatar. Educational Management Administration and Leadership.

Uleanya, C. and Naicker, S.R. (2025). Future-fit and innovative school leadership in the African context: Lessons for sustainability in underdeveloped and developing countries. Leadership and Policy in Schools, Volume 24, Issue 1.

Bush, T. (2015). School leadership preparation and development in Africa: A critical insight. Educational Management Administration and Leadership.

Next Read

The voices profiled here are the thinkers. Putting their ideas into practice inside a school requires a different kind of resource: the practical facilitation, team alignment, and leadership development work that changes how leadership teams actually function day to day. For a global directory of the leadership development experts, consultants, and facilitators who work specifically with school teams, check out my blog post '31 Best Leadership Development Experts for Schools (2026)' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/leadership-development-experts-schools.

For a companion global list covering primary school education globally, check out '50 Essential Thought Leaders in Primary School Education Globally' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-primary-school-education-globally.