‘Every now and then amidst the gloom, however, a genuinely scholarly article or monograph bobs up which renews one's sense of hope and restores one's faith in the academic enterprise. Valerie Hall's Dancing on the Ceiling is a case in point. I read it, enjoyed it and found it genuinely uplifting .... And the notion of formation is what makes this book so important, for Valerie Hall was not only keen to document what it meant to be an educational leader from the perspectives of these six women, but how it was that each of them became school heads.... Her book is one of the rare examples in which I have seen such a penetrating level of leadership character analysis attempted, let alone crafted as well as Hall succeeds in doing. In thi