Development of students' leadership competencies: a case of summer schools

Our paper focuses on summer schools as a tool of building leader's competencies, intelligent and creative abilities in present-day students of higher vocational school. It deals with main concepts of summer schools based on the study of issue-related publications, presents the most complete and extended classification of summer schools, and analyzes them in the educational services market in a number of countries of the world. The paper investigates summer schools, both from those operating on a multidisciplinary basis and those specialized ones in Russia, CIS countries, and some well-known summer leadership schools in the global educational services market. This paper is based on the classifications of summer schools presented in modern academic and practical literature. Moreover, the paper presents the findings of our own unique survey on young people's perception of a modern leader. It also substantiates the role of summer schools in the development of leadership skills and qualities in young people according to the concept of continuous education (i.e. life-long learning).