Successive UK governments have pursued policies to diversify school provision across England nested in neo-liberal ideologies. Reforms has focused both on generating autonomy and distinctiveness with the state system of schools and the creation of new "types" of schools outside local democratic accountability. There are now approximately 70 "types" of schools, characterised through parental choice, provisions of private interests, and a trends toward private funding with subsidies from taxpayers. In short, public schools are increasingly privatised, owned and run by private individuals and consortia which profit from services rendered to and through the school. Business models dominate the training and performance of school principals as leaders. Consideration of school leadership in Asia suggests that research frameworks are bound by a range of factors that differentiate leadership and leadership research across the region. These include the following: socio-economic developments connected to the allocation of resources for research and the development of researchers’ capacities; a tendency for societies with emergent research capacity to communicate understanding of school leadership—sometimes empirical—through prescriptive or descriptive writing; the degree of boundedness to political realities and policy objectives shapes the principalship from being relatively autonomous to agents of the state, and the borrowing of policies which influences how the work of principals are prioritised and contextualised across the respective Asia societal cultures.