Abstract
I am writing this editorial during the COVID-19 ‘lockdown’, which is having a profound impact on all our personal and professional lives, across the globe. I hope that you are safe and well, and managing to stay engaged and productive, as educational leaders, students, scholars and researchers. We are all learning to operate in new ways, without the stimulus and support engendered by regular face-to-face contact. EMAL activity is continuing as normal, using our virtual platform. Submissions are at an all-time high, indicating that the EMAL family remains fully engaged in knowledge production.
The first article in this issue, by Jessica Holloway and Amanda Keddie, examines the impact of school autonomy on social justice in Australia. The authors indicate that autonomous schooling attracts a great deal of political interest worldwide but add that social justice is compromised and fractured by decentralisation. They interviewed 13 principals across 3 Australian states, with a specific focus on the links between social justice and autonomy. They report that principals enact autonomy in socially just ways but note that this is more difficult for those serving economically disadvantaged contexts. They conclude that social justice requires social cohesion, adding that this ‘is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain in a decentralised system’.
Julia Morris and her colleagues also focus on Australia, in their study of staff culture in a secondary school. The authors define school culture to mean the collective values and beliefs of school staff. They conducted a survey of staff on organisational health, and also collected data via focus groups, in a metropolitan secondary school. The data indicated eight factors that contributed to staff morale. Four of these were given specific attention by the school leadership team: appraisal and recognition, participative decision-making, professional growth and supportive leadership. The authors conclude that there was an overall improvement in morale, linked to professional learning and a shared vision.
Haim Shaked and Pascale Sarah Benoliel examine the relationship between two important themes: instructional leadership and boundary management. They contend that the existing literature on instructional leadership ‘often stops at the school boundary’ and focuses mainly on internal processes. They adopted purposive sampling to identify 37 participant principals in Israel. The authors argue that instructional leadership is not wholly internal, that boundary management is not solely external and that these two constructs are not mutually exclusive. They conclude that an instructional boundary manager should be a ‘mediating agent’, linking internal and external stakeholders.
Andre du Plessis and Jan Heystek explore the extent and nature of distributed leadership in South African schools. They question whether it is possible for shared or distributed leadership to co-exist with the country’s traditional bureaucratic system. The authors conducted discourse analysis of laws and policy documents. They note that the South African Standard for Principals appears to assume distributed leadership but argue that this is ‘in danger’ of being compromised by the existing hierarchical bureaucracy of the South African education system.
Many South African schools serve children and young people in challenging contexts, with high levels of poverty and unemployment in rural areas and townships. Hettie Van der Merwe examines the management of academic outcomes in one such township secondary school. She shows that 60% of public schools are regarded as dysfunctional, leading to a two-tier public schooling system. Her case-study school serves learners from ‘informal settlements’, with parents surviving on informal trading and part-time employment. She conducted interviews with leaders, teachers and learners, a total of 18 participants. She concludes that the school’s intervention programme is resulting in positive outcomes for increasing numbers of final-year learners.
The notion of professional learning communities (PLCs) has grown in significance as part of a wider recognition that collaborative work is important for teacher development and school improvement. Chrysa Pui Chi Keung and her colleagues explore this phenomenon in respect of kindergarten education in Hong Kong, focusing also on how principals can lead and foster PLCs. They conducted a survey of teachers in Hong Kong kindergartens, with a substantial response (2120 teachers). Their findings indicate that kindergarten teachers take collective responsibility for children’s learning and that principals were the key agents in facilitating the development of PLCs. However, they caution that PLC activities have relatively weak effects on teacher efficacy.
The Hong Kong study confirms established evidence that principals play a major role in school improvement. However, research on principal selection remains limited. There are indications, in some settings, that professional criteria are important for the recruitment of new heads. Normatively, this often includes an emphasis on instructional leadership, which may or may not be assessed through formal leadership preparation programmes. In some contexts, including China (Xue and Bush, forthcoming), political considerations and ‘acceptability’ are more significant than professional credibility. Michael Romanowski and his colleagues examine this issue in Qatar’s government schools. Qatar has developed five leadership standards, which influence principal selection. The authors interviewed 21 principals and conducted focus groups with 3 policy-makers and 84 teachers. The findings show that principals must be Qatari nationals, and have a degree and at least 10 years’ teaching experience. They must also complete an interview, where questions relate to the leadership standards, and complete two government courses. The authors conclude that the major difference from international expectations is the requirement for Qatari nationality, which necessarily limits the pool of candidates.
Schools are traditionally regarded as the ‘prime institutions’ in any educational system, although the emergence of multi-academy trusts has modified this view in England. There is also growing interest in educational networks as a way of providing peer support for school development. Such networks are configured in different ways and Nina Kolleck, Angelika Rieck and Miri Yemini examine this phenomenon in respect of cross-sector collaborations in Germany. They claim that such cross-sector networks can be fruitful. Drawing on social network theory, the authors conducted a case study in the Ruhr region. Using a snowball approach, they surveyed and interviewed cross-sector network participants. They report strong support for the initiative’s goal, with higher levels of identification for ‘central actors’ in the networks. However, the lower levels of identification from peripheral actors may impair the effective operation of such networks.
Districts in the United States may also have a systemic impact on schools and principals. Kimberley LeChasseur, Morgaen Donaldson and Jeremy Landa explore principal peer networks and note that there may be overt or covert conflict between principals and central office administrators. They examine this issue through a case study of the micropolitics of professional learning in one urban US district, with 28 participants from a variety of roles. The findings show how principals navigated district micropolitics, through negotiation, compromise and alliance-building, classic features of political models of educational leadership.
This issue of the journal features nine papers from seven countries on five continents, further evidence of the global significance of educational leadership as a field of study and practice.