In many European countries, external as well as internal social, economic and political changes have brought about a marked need for professional training of managerial staff in education. This article is one in a series that springs out of a British Council sponsored conference held in the Czech Republic in 2003, organized jointly by the Educational Management Centre of the Faculty of Education at Charles University, Prague, and the Centre for Educational Leadership of the Faculty of Education at The University of Manchester. The article offers a comparative analysis of the leadership and management staff training patterns practised in the education sector in three European Union countries: Finland, the Netherlands, and France. The structure of the article is based around an evocation of the context, structure of nature of the education system in each of the three countries, and exploration and analysis of the associated methods of educational leadership training, and development in each nation, followed by a comparative meta-analysis of the key overall emergent themes that can be distilled from these national experiences.