Changes in the society influence the education directly and therefore require permanent adjustments and improvements of the educational institutions. According to this, the school identity and the school image play the ever growing role in defining the part and the place of the school in the society, and the leaders of these institutions have an important part in creating and managing of them. The contribution of the school principals as the school managers is of the extreme importance, because he/she, as the competent business leader of the school, has a multiple responsibility for its positioning in the public, and also the power of the direct and indirect influence of its identity and image. The theme of this paper, the creation of the school image through the role of the school principals based on the examples of the Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Macedonia, has not been researched so far, therefore the results of this research are enough to implement the model of the creation of the school image based on the competences of its principals and the strategy of the corporative communication with a goal of satisfying the needs of its users and the targeted public as well as achieving excellence. The basic thesis of this paper is to show how the communicational and organizational skills of the principals significantly influence the school image regardless of the educational system and the state. Following the above mentioned the focus is put on the inclusion of the successful school principals who will enable the differentiation by creating the school image by comparison with other schools. The doctoral thesis presents the results of the research which involved 255 primary school principals from the Republic of Croatia and 159 primary school principals from the Republic of Macedonia. The assessed results represent the starting point to the school principals for defining and strengthening the competences that can help them in the more efficient implementation of the systematic changes in the educational system through their part, and point to the importance of their part which is necessary to be revised, because the results show the problems in the managing of schools and do not recognize the importance of creating the school image to preserve and affirm the cultural identity.