This article will examine the transference of transformational leadership models to an English educational context in the light of both globalisation pressures, and of the current UK Government's response to these. It will be argued that this response is predicated upon its perception of the need to develop a highly skilled, technologically proficient workforce, and that the creation of this workforce cannot be left to the vagaries of a market-based approach. A highly directed system of education has therefore been developed, in which success by school headteachers is increasingly defined as the achievement of centrally-imposed outcome measures. However, the article also presents evidence to suggest that this situation has been exacerbated at both headteacher and teacher level by professional cultures which collude with Government legislation to further prevent such transformation realisation. This article therefore argues that those advocating a genuinely transformational model of leadership may have considerable difficulty in getting their model adopted in the UK, or in other states adopting similar approaches and with similar teacher cultures. More generally, then, the need for a more culturally and politically contextualised approach to models of leadership is suggested.