Educational Management Administration & Leadership

In England, current punitive and performative inspection practices have intensified public resentment towards the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (OfSTED). In 2024, a new His Majesty's Chief Inspector was appointed, initiating a system-wide review of the inspection framework and practice. In July 2024, the Labour government won the general election, raising hopes of resetting the accountability system. Against this backdrop, this paper presents an insider's view of OfSTED. Eleven former Her Majesty's Inspectors and serving OfSTED inspectors were interviewed. Through the lenses of espoused theories and theories-in-use, this study uncovered inspectors’ shared concerns about an increasingly politicised OfSTED, a narrowed focus on education quality, an increased workload and diminished professional autonomy. Some root causes behind inconsistent inspection judgements and highly standardised inspection reports were explained. While only a few inspectors wanted to abolish one-word judgements at the time of the interviews, all expressed genuine belief in the value of inspection when carefully designed and properly conducted to serve pupils and schools. This paper highlights why scrapping one-word judgements is a welcome change, but more work is needed to rebuild trust, professionalise and depoliticise OfSTED, encourage local ingenuity and lower the stakes of inspections.

The issue of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and educational leadership has become a central topic following the shift to knowledge technology and digital literacy in recent years. Despite increasing attention to the topic among scholars and policymakers during the last decade, we lack a comprehensive review of AI and educational leadership. Therefore, by using bibliometric analysis of data derived from the Scopus database, this paper represents a systematic scoping of AI and educational leadership, tracing its development, characteristics, and knowledge accumulation within broad perspectives. Results identify key trends, geographic representation, topical foci, main concepts, themes, and their interconnections, including their implications for targeted Sustainable Development Goals. Implications, limitations, and future research reviewed in the studies are fully discussed.

Following the accumulation and diversification of the knowledge base in the field of educational leadership and management, we have witnessed a boom in systematic reviews of different types focusing on a diverse range of topics in specified geographical boundaries. This study aims to gain insight into the nature and composition of this fast-growing body of systematic reviews in educational leadership and management by examining the methods used, the topics explored and the geographies covered in these reviews through a three-dimensional conceptual model. We analysed 236 systematic reviews spread over 60 journals. Descriptive statistics of frequencies and percentages were used to identify trends. Findings suggest that the conceptual model presented provides important insights into the past, present and future of a knowledge base through its focus on the patterns of knowledge evident in systematic reviews. While affirming the widespread recognition of the value of systematic reviews in the field, the results reveal that systematic reviews have largely focused on a narrow range of topics, suggesting evidence available on many widely explored topics that still await to be synthesised. Reviews focusing on methodological issues have been particularly rare. It is also demonstrated that the field itself has attracted significant attention as a unit of analysis, indicating the interest in mapping the research landscape and understanding the dynamics of the field at global, regional and national levels. Based on these findings, potential gaps have been identified, and suggestions have been made for future directions.

This narrative review provides a fine-grained picture of principal resilience research from 47 journal articles starting from its birth in 2005 to 2024. Following the guidelines of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA), this systematic review clarifies the construct of principal resilience and identifies the drivers and outcomes of principal resilience. As a result, a conceptual framework of principal resilience demonstrating the conceptual and empirical nexus among drivers, mechanisms, and outcomes which may serve as the spotlight for future directions in the perspectives of theory, methodology, and practice is presented. However, fragmentation of construct needs further investigation and evidence is still largely insufficient to declare it a mature scientific field. Promoting principal resilience is not just a buzz direction, but a solid path towards achieving individual principals’ growth and quality education.

The Master Principal Studio (MPS) in China is a key component of the Leading Program for Excellent Principals (ming xiaozhang gongcheng). In this initiative, outstanding principals are selected and endorsed by official authorities to establish studios, where they serve as hosts. Junior principals and middle leaders join these studios as members, participating in collaborative learning experiences. MPS fosters a network of schools, connecting principals at different stages of their professional growth. This research explores the network leadership practices of MPS hosts. Data were collected through semi-structured interview with 13 hosts, 19 members, 10 student principals (as extended members), and 4 studio assistants in 13 different levels of MPSs in China. The findings show that the MPSs’ hosts employed various network leadership strategies to create an empowering and supportive learning ecosystem within the studio. This sheds light on the importance of nurturing and leveraging diverse relationships within professional learning networks to achieve collective success and drive educational advancement.

As a multifaceted concept, teacher professionalism lays particular emphasis on strong moral purposes and commitment to the teaching profession in the Chinese cultural context, compared with teacher agency, but it is not yet known whether it can be enhanced by high-involvement management in Chinese schools. By conducting a questionnaire survey of primary and secondary school teachers, this study used structural equation modeling to unpack the relationship between high-involvement management and teacher professionalism. The results showed that high-involvement management had a significant positive effect on career commitment and positive emotions of teachers, which both exerted the positive effects on professionalism. Career commitment and positive emotions play the single mediation and sequential mediation between high-involvement management and teacher professionalism. The high-involvement management model cannot directly facilitate professionalism, but only have an indirect positive impact through the full mediation of career commitment and positive emotions.

The purpose of this qualitative, hermeneutical phenomenological study was to understand expatriate teachers’ experiences with the leadership in Chinese internationalised schools. A sample of 15 expatriate teachers with diverse demographics and backgrounds, among them nine licenced teachers from non-Anglophone countries, contributed their insights in individual interviews, written protocols, and focus groups. All participants had worked in Chinese internationalised schools for at least one school year and had experiences with the schools’ leaders. Their accounts revealed that senior leadership in Chinese internationalised schools is local and driven by profit and the Chinese work culture. Expatriate leaders, while supportive, mostly occupy mid-level management positions. Expatriate teachers feel insignificant to their leaders and respond to dissatisfaction with the management by terminating employment rather than adjusting. The findings confirm prior research, corroborating reports of unskilled and unstable leadership in international schools. The tokenistic role of expatriate managers, who may be hired for their foreign appearance and have little influence on managing the schools, is a new and unexpected finding. The study narrows a gap in the literature and has implications for recruiting and managing expatriate teachers in international schools.

The past five decades has seen four dominant models of educational leadership emerge, as the fashion shifted from managerial, towards instructional, then transformational, and the currently dominant distributed approach. At the same time, other models have emerged in literature such as moral, authentic, systems, and contingency leadership. This paper focuses attention on the leadership approach expected by the senior leader (‘Directors’) of well-established autonomous traditional international schools governed by a parental-led Board, where a complexity of tensions and dualities has previously been reported by literature. At the same time, this body of schools stands under-reported upon. Following an analysis of the action verbs found in 10 job adverts, across 10 nations globally, we can identify a strong pattern of anticipated role, characterised by the ‘old fashioned’ managerial, and instructional approaches, with the Director being expected to steer the school on a steady, continuous course rather than instigate any major change or innovation. A role of responsible stewardship emerges, with the Director being expended to maintain, continue, and oversee events as previously done by others. The lack of scope for distributed or contingency leadership seems surprising given the changing social and political environment that the schools occupy.

Caring leadership has emerged as an approach that can help strengthen school leadership practices to promote the cognitive and social-emotional development of the school community. Therefore, our goal is to study the differences between how school principals perceive their practices to promote the development of a school culture of care and teachers’ perceptions of those same practices. For this purpose, the Caring School Leadership Questionnaire (CSLQ) by author Van Der Vyver (2014), was translated and validated statistically and subsequently applied to 332 school principals and 333 teachers in the Metropolitan Region of Chile. The results of the questionnaire reveal different perceptions among the two types of actors, varying across each dimension. Most differences are seen around the practices related to psychological well-being, with fewer noticeable differences in relation to practices associated with the workplace.

Contemporary school principals are tasked with promoting equity within their schools. The importance of this endeavor is clear; however, there is a need for greater clarity regarding the specific responsibilities involved. Addressing this need is the goal of this study. Data were collected from 21 principals of elementary schools in Israel using semistructured interviews. Data analysis included four stages: sorting, coding, categorizing, and theorizing. The findings illustrate how the framework of strong equity, comprising the four Rs—redistribution, recognition, representation, and reframing—can be applied to school leadership to encompass the key responsibilities that principals have in promoting equity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study aimed to explore schools’ ambidexterity profiles and examine how each profile influences the relationship between instructional leadership and teacher instructional practices. Using data from 1150 teachers across 108 schools in Turkey, we employed multilevel latent profile analysis to group schools into clusters based on aggregated teachers’ responses to organisational ambidexterity. We conducted moderation analyses with latent profile variables. Results revealed two distinct profiles: high explorative-exploitative and low explorative-exploitative schools. The study also provided evidence of the significant moderating role that school ambidexterity profiles played in the link between leadership and teaching. We discussed implications for policy and practice.

Leadership and teacher professional development are two of the most significant factors influencing student outcomes. This study adopted leadership for learning as its theoretical framework to investigate the effect of leadership on teachers’ engagement with teacher professional development, and the mediating roles of teacher self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy in this relationship. With this purpose, the study employed meta-analytical structural equation modelling on data from 102 studies with a sample size of 100,211 participants from 23 countries. The results indicated that leadership for learning had a ‘large’ effect on teacher professional development, teacher self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy. Similarly, a significant relationship was found between teacher professional development, teacher self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy as well as between teacher self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy. These results supported both the study hypothesis and the results evident in the literature.

Leadership for learning has emerged as a holistic leadership behaviour that combines aspects of instructional leadership, transformational leadership and shared leadership. Little is known about how this type of leadership develops and what antecedents are important. Following the rationales of Social Cognitive (Career) Theory and applying Chan and Drasgow's leader development model, we examine how leadership mastery experience and leader self-efficacy affect leadership for learning in Nigerian schools. We divide leaders’ self-efficacy into the belief that they have the necessary skills and abilities to be successful as leaders (leader self-regulatory self-efficacy) and the belief that the actions they take as leaders will have the desired effect (leader action self-efficacy). Using structural equation modelling, our results show that both leadership mastery experience and leader self-efficacy are relevant antecedents of leadership for learning, with self-efficacy mediating the effects of experience on leadership. Our results suggest efficiency–performance spirals and illustrate how important it is for the enactment of leadership for learning to believe in one's ability to competently perform various critical leadership actions.

The South African government's substantive shift to decentralize school governance from a centralized state to local communities created several financial management challenges. Concerns for the appropriate utilization of funds, rigorous oversight, and adherence to established financial protocols underscore the fundamental financial stress points experienced in many historically disadvantaged schools. Since 1994, financial mismanagement of public schools is rife, and this is partly attributed to school governing bodies’ of rural and township schools who lack financial expertise. Utilizing a multiple case study design grounded in an interpretivist paradigm, this study examines the internal financial control to manage the finances of schools located in urban, townships, and rural areas. The perceptions and experiences of 18 participants of six schools were solicited. We applied the Accountability Theory which presupposes that financial control is the foundation to establish effective financial processes that hold financial managers accountable. Findings reveal that quintile 1 township and rural schools experience challenges to effectively manage school financial management through the implementation of well-constructed internal financial monitoring and control processes. The finance policy, an internal control mechanism, forms the bedrock to hold financial managers accountable to invariably manage school finances effectively.

A growing body of literature reveals how women in higher education are either excluded from leadership roles or face challenges when they take such responsibilities. The role of religion in Muslim societies is vital to understand Muslim women's sense of “self” and their academic leadership roles and engagement in social and political activities. This study uses Bakhtin's writings as well as a feminist perspective in Islam to unpack how religious discourses shape and construe Muslim women's leadership roles in a public university in Pakistan. Data in this study was drawn from two sources: (a) semi-structured interviews with women academic leaders and academics and (b) focus group discussions with postgraduate students. Findings suggest that discourse around women's leadership in higher education in Pakistan is influenced by a male-centric religious monoglossia characterized by discourses on the hijab, masculinist religious epistemologies, and male-centric divine imagery. In addition, the study points to heteroglossic de-centering of the religious monoglossia by suggesting heteroglossic fluidity in Pakistani religious ethics that favors women's roles as leaders in higher education. A heteroglossic fluidity is characterized by how Islam is viewed as a national project, interpreted along sectarian and gendered lines, and often misused to discourage women from assuming leadership roles.

Teacher voice behaviour is a significant instrument for developing positive change, better decision-making and raised school efficacy at an educational institution, with a principal's leadership facilitating this mechanism. The purpose of this study is to investigate how and under what conditions a school principal's implementation of distributed leadership affects teacher voice behaviour within their school. Data from 1024 teachers across 36 public schools in Kuwait was examined using regression analysis and bootstrapping methods. This research examined a moderated mediation model of distributed leadership effects upon teacher voice behaviour, with teacher psychological empowerment included as the mediator and power distance orientation as the moderator. Results revealed a partial mediation model and found that distributed leadership had significant direct and indirect effects upon teacher voice behaviour. Power distance orientation negatively moderated the relationship between psychological empowerment and teacher voice behaviour. This study contributes to existing distributed leadership literature by identifying psychological empowerment as an additional mediator, and power distance orientation as a boundary condition, in the relationship between distributed leadership and teacher voice behaviour. This study's findings could provide the conceptual basis for interventions designed to promote teacher voice behavior.

This ethnographic case study examines the artifacts of the leadership culture of one Finnish early childhood education (ECE) center and how they appear from the perspective of broad-based pedagogical leadership. Qualitative content analysis with a directed approach was guided by Pasquale Gagliardi’s and Mary Hatch’s definitions of artifacts. In addition, artifacts were analyzed through broad-based pedagogical leadership. Based on the analysis, thirteen activities, six verbal expressions, and thirteen objects of leadership culture were found in the data. Most of the artifacts were indirect pedagogical leadership, and some had several purposes due to staff interpretations. The interpretations varied both between the leaders and the staff but also within the staff. The findings indicate that symbolic leadership is present in many leadership situations and that a lack of knowledge about the symbolic and cultural dimensions of leadership can undermine leaders’ good intentions. The results of the study can be utilized in practical work in leading organizational cultures and in structuring pedagogical leadership in ECE. Additionally, the research has theoretical implications by enriching leadership research in ECE and enhancing the concept of broad-based pedagogical leadership, which can be used in leadership training programs in the field of education.

This paper presents a multisource and multimethod investigation of the relationship between principals’ strategic cognitive complexity (SCC) and school outcomes assessed by parents, as mediated by teachers’ identification with the school. We have assessed the SCC of 165 school principals, derived from interviews in which they described their strategy and long-term educational vision for the school. A sample of teachers from these Romanian schools (2687 teachers in total, 360 male) reported their identification with the school and a sample of parents (10080 in total, 1658 male) assessed the school academic climate and reported their engagement with the school. We used a non-linear mediation procedure and show that SCC has an inverted U-shaped association with teachers identification with the school that in turn has a positive association with parents’ engagement with the school and their rating of the academic climate. Our results challenge the universality of SCC benefits in schools and point out the importance of exploring diminishing benefits associated with SCC by using multisource data and the “too much of a good thing” theoretical framework as a guide for future research directions in strategic management in schools.

Emerging research highlights the central role of leadership in the effectiveness of Turkish schools, particularly in influencing teacher engagement, a key factor in achieving better school outcomes. This study investigated how and under what conditions school leadership is beneficial for teachers’ work engagement using data collected from 368 public secondary school teachers in Turkey. A model was developed to explore the direct and indirect relationships among school leadership, teacher job satisfaction, and work engagement, and it was tested at both the teacher and school levels. A multilevel structural equation model analysis was used to test the developed model. The results indicated that school leadership has a significant impact on teachers’ job engagement, regardless of the school where they work. Furthermore, job satisfaction played a mediating role in the relationship between school leadership and work engagement at both levels. The effect of school leadership on teachers’ work engagement at both levels occurs on the condition that job satisfaction acts as a mediator. This result makes a valuable contribution to the existing literature. Based on the results of the study, we also offer some suggestions for policy makers and school leaders to increase teacher work engagement by emphasising teacher job satisfaction.