The authors focus on the investment into school leadership in England during the New Labour governments from 1997, and through this they make a contribution to an ongoing scholarly conversation about leadership development. They are concerned to both understand and explain leadership as a policy intervention into the professional practice and identities of the school workforce. They argue that one of the dominant genres of contemporary media--the makeover--has become part of the policy-making "game". The paper uses the metaphor of makeover to critically examine the current approach to leadership development and to examine the policy game at play in English education. (Contains 13 notes.)