The editors have taken the position, in publishing this e-book, that there are three inter-related aspects to school capacity. The first refers to material features such as students, staff (teaching, administrative, other), infrastructure and other resources including finances. Often these material features are dependent on levels of student enrolment through fees and funding arrangements. The second aspect of school capacity refers to more intangible features such as school culture and climate, staff cohesion and motivation, distributed leadership capacity, principal effectiveness, professional learning, 'corporate memory', pedagogical approaches and effectiveness and teacher quality. Effective leaders seek to increase both material and intangible capacity through their decisions, strategies and actions.

The third aspect refers to wider resourcing and support for schools and education at systemic, state, national and even international levels (e.g., OECD). This can be difficult – it is disturbing how often, for example, government funding for key support mechanisms and resources for schools are 'turned on' and 'turned off', depending on extraneous factors such as the state of the economy, political ideological differences and the electoral cycle.

In each of the three aspects above it is not unusual to see a combination of 'carrots and sticks' (Scott and Dinham, 2002) used in an effort to lift performance and build capacity in education, i.e., a combination of pressure, support, reward and 'punishment' (see for example, No Child Left Behind (2001) and Race to the Top (2009) in the USA).

A key question however, is whether any capacity-building of the kinds outlined above is lasting or sustainable.