Across the Anglophone world leadership preparation and development has become a key leverage
point in education policy with many nations establishing systems of licensing, accreditation and
mandatory programmes. Outside the Anglophone world and central powers of the global north,
school leadership preparation and development exists in a highly contested space that balances
colonial legacy, deficit thinking, and an unrelenting desire to compete on a global scale, with calls
for localized knowledge, values and histories. In this paper we problematize this context by arguing
that the ontological complicity of policy interventions – particularly those funded by the global
north – is shaping African developments in a manner that is exclusive of localized knowledge and in
doing so, constrains that which it sort to improve in the first place. We build our argument on two
key points: first, the centrality of preparation programmes in our understanding of educational
leadership, management and administration; and second, the apparent absence of interrogation of
the socio-political work of constructing the research object. What we propose is a greater need to
e epistemological preliminaries of research, rather than just the confirmation or disconfirmation, of the researcher’s model of reality