This chapter explores Teacher Education as an ongoing professional trajectory, exploring the implications for both the policy and practice teacher professional identity, and how this has developed its later stages in career trajectory, in three different nation-states of the UK, Sweden and Russia. Here we choose to focus on the different national interpretations of leadership preparation and development, and the links between this and the support of Principals in schools. In the UK over the last decade, the development offered to senior staff has been led by an increasingly marketised approach, which has steadily moved further away from academic expertise and Higher Education qualifications. In contrast, the system in Sweden has thoroughly maintained its links in leadership preparation inside universities, building a rapport between senior staff in schools and their counterparts in university education departments. While in the Russian system these HEI links are also maintained, yet the national framework under which they operate is only now in its embryonic stages.