This article illuminates major features of high-quality leadership programmes across different education systems. We do so by focusing on capturing commonalities and variations in high-quality pre-service programmes from five differing societies, all of which are high-performing education systems. To this end, we first delineate key profiles of each programme. Based on that, we discuss commonalities and variations in leadership programmes in terms of framework, content and operational features. Finally, we flesh out important implications for policy and practice.