Leadership Succession Planning, Talent Identification and Development, Professional Capacity Building, Employee Retention and Organizational Support as Drivers of Sustainable Educational Leadership in the Ghana Education Service

Abstract

Sustainable educational leadership thrives in an environment in which succession planning, talent identification and development, professional capacity building, retention strategies and organizational support are an integrated system. This article re-examines these five interconnected drivers when applied to educational administration within the Ghanaian context and summarizes empirical research, policy reports and literature on similar low and middle-income environments. Using a structured literature-synthesis (n ≈ 29 strong sources), the paper identifies common obstacles including informal succession, weak talent pipelines, episodic training, rural attrition, and fragmented HR systems and identifies pragmatic policy levers, which can be aligned with national priorities. The findings indicate that an integrated, sequenced approaches (codified career pathways, mentored acting appointments, school-based sustained CPD, targeted rural retention packages and strengthened HR analytics) are more likely to yield durable leadership improvement than isolated interventions. The discussion connects theories (transformational, instructional and distributed leadership) to practice and end up with prioritized policies and future research recommendations.