Abstract
The ‘Carpe Vitam: Leadership for Learning’ project set out with an ambitious agenda to look cross‐nationally at the constructs and practice of leadership and learning in schools. The greatest challenge, then, was describing how those two aspects of life in school connect and influence each other. It was an aim of the project to create a fertile space in which practitioners and researchers could explore leadership and learning and allow the given differences in national and cultural context to sharpen, challenge and define a growing theory of action to understand learning‐focused leadership in schools.