The aim with this scoping review is to provide an overview of research on school leaders’ response to neoliberal education reform. There have been claims that there is a lack of empirical research critically examining the vast amounts of education reforms from a local perspective This review is an answer to that call, as it analyses existing research on school leaders’ experience of neoliberal reforms using empirical data. This article employs a resistance theory perspective. The search resulted in 21 articles that met all the inclusion criteria. A descriptive analysis and a content analysis was undertaken. The latter considers how school leaders navigate the reforms, and also how they resisted them. The results show that resistance was manifested in terms such as speaking your mind, irony, simulation and compliance. The reviewed studies exemplify some of the problems of the ‘new professionalism’ fashioned by educational policy seeking to steer the work of schools in a competitive school marketplace. Overall, the review underscores the transformative nature of educational reforms on education and the imperative for using resistance and power theories to both help shed light on the sometimes soul altering changes these initiatives can achieve and point to possible counter-discourse and counter-conduct.