Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to examine perspectives of successful and effective leadership as well as successful and effective schools in an effort to uncover the governance interventions which produce one or the other characterization. This examination is undertaken through the utilization of two guiding frameworks: the Pashiardis-Brauckmann Holistic Leadership Framework and the Bredeson and Johansson framework for principals’ functions. Additionally, views on success and effectiveness from around the world are utilized. Following this, in this theoretically focused paper we make the argument that successful schools institutionalize the right processes in order to achieve and sustain the desired results and thus become effective. Then, in an effort to bring context into the equation, we discuss what the context is for each education system and student and if schools can make up for the deficiencies of a student’s individual context. We end our discussion by stressing the fact that researchers, through their work, can inspire teachers and principals with their (often) simple descriptions of complex school improvement processes. These descriptions have a profound effect on the applied pedagogical work in schools, which is sometimes more influential than national policy decisions and educational reforms.
We realize that what successful and effective school leadership means is enormously varied in its conceptual foundations depending on where researchers and practitioners live and work, as well as where they receive their epistemological influences from. Thus, there is a necessity for us to comprehend the richness of the current literature on successful and effective school leadership and to use it as a guiding framework for both the local development of leaders into successful careers and to mutually support the development of school systems throughout the globe, into successful and effective educational systems. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to examine perspectives of successful and effective leadership as well as successful and effective schools in an effort to uncover the governance interventions and influences which produce one or the other characterization. This examination will be undertaken through the utilization of two guiding frameworks: the Pashiardis-Brauckmann Holistic Leadership Framework (Brauckmann and Pashiardis, 2011) and the Bredeson and Johansson (2000) framework for principals’ functions. Additionally, views on success and effectiveness from around the world will be utilized.
The need for indigenous views on what constitutes success and effectiveness is central as well, since the issue of what constitutes successful and effective school leadership is increasingly becoming a global debate. To begin with, we should state at the outset that we consider the term ‘successful’ as more inclusive, a kind of an umbrella term, which embraces effectiveness as well. However, this does not mean that the term ‘successful’ is a substitute for ‘effective’ (Pashiardis and Johansson, 2016a). In fact, we are debating if ‘successful’ is about putting the right systems and structures in place and improving on them, so that we can get the necessary results as required (that is, being effective). In sum, is being successful more about the processes for achieving the desired results and is being effective more about obtaining the results themselves? Moreover, most of the time we also see a connection in the literature between effective and efficient use of resources in order to get the best possible results, which is another aspect of the distinction between ‘successful’ and ‘effective’. The international community of school leadership researchers has been using the terms ‘successful’ and ‘effective’ interchangeably and with not much agreement as to what these two terms really mean in a particular context (Day and Leithwood, 2007; Day et al., 2008; Hallinger and Heck, 1998; Mowat and McMahon, 2019).
At the same time, school leaders’ roles and responsibilities are being reconceptualized. School leaders are not limited to bureaucratic functions, as used to be the case in most places around the world, but, on the contrary, they have an increasing repertoire of roles and responsibilities, such as being the pedagogical or the entrepreneurial leader of the school or taking charge of creating the necessary strategic vision and structures for the school to improve in a safe environment (Brauckmann and Pashiardis, 2011; Moos et al., 2011; Pashiardis and Brauckmann, 2019). For this expanded repertoire of functions and leadership roles, the tendency is to keep increasing, adding more duties and responsibilities on the shoulders of school leaders (Sebastian et al., 2018).
Our discussion will make the argument for the situation where both successful and effective leadership is in focus cell ‘SE’, as can be seen in Table 1. We strongly believe that this is the only combination which can, in the long run, create a kind of leadership that is sustainable towards improving children’s learning. In this kind of leadership, we have a clear co-variation of both aspects of leadership.
The relation between successful and effective leadership.
All other cells are dysfunctional in relation to sustainable leadership. The leaders in cell ‘Se’ might be successful in the short run and show improvement in children’s learning but without any relation to what might be effective in the long run and therefore fail, most often because of too high costs for society. The counterpart to this cell is ‘sE’, which focuses too much on efficiency in relation to cost for personnel and material (i.e. budget cuts), and has too little focus on how children learn successfully. Finally the leaders that are included in cell ‘se’ will probably be representing failing schools and will not be serving as school leaders for long. To end this introduction of the two terms, we are keen to stress that what ‘successful’ and ‘effective’ mean seems also to depend on the degree and level of (a) centralization/decentralization of the educational system of a specific country; as well as on (b) the accountability and evaluation mechanisms in place; and (c) the ability of parents to choose schools for their children (Brauckmann and Pashiardis, 2011; Brezicha et al., 2015; Hallinger, 2018; Hoy, 2012; Johansson and Ärlestig, 2020; Rönnström and Johansson, 2018).
Successful and effective school leadership: the debate around the world
One of the main school success and effectiveness variables researched in the literature is, of course, school leadership. Several researchers investigated the relationship between school leadership and student achievement through various models, such as the direct model, the reciprocal model and the indirect model (Edmonds, 1979; Hallinger and Heck, 1996, 1998). The topic is still very much the favourite object of investigation in many parts of the world. A framework through which to explore school leadership and its effects on student achievement is the Pashiardis-Brauckmann Holistic Leadership Framework, which makes reference to the Leadership Cocktail Mix (Pashiardis, 2014). The centrepiece of the framework became the Leadership Radius, which is the action area of the school leader, as one of the central figures within the school. This action area is manifested when school leaders perform their duties through five main styles of leadership as follows: (a) instructional style; (b) structuring style; (c) participative style; (d) entrepreneurial style; and (e) personnel development style. Each leadership style consists of specific behaviours and practices which are likely to be exhibited by school principals. The five leadership styles are not discrete, but rather there is a degree of overlap among them, and thus ‘hybrid’ styles begin to emerge as well (Brauckmann and Pashiardis, 2011).
Another framework through which we can examine successful and effective school leaders is to also look for the principals’ functions as defined by Bredeson and Johansson (2000). In their study they focused on the roles a principal can have in relation to how they interact with their teachers and their schools. They identified the following four roles for school leaders: (a) stewards; (b) communicators; (c) experts; and (d) models of learning. In this section, we are drawing from the two frameworks and enriching them in order to distinguish between successful and effective practices of school leaders, as explored in various parts of the world. We also recognize Yukl’s (1994) definition which claims that leadership reflects the leader’s intention to influence someone else to understand what is best for the organization. These ideas are also related to transformational leadership and its intention to see values as the glue of leadership. At this point, it is important to clarify that we are aware of the existence of many different and complementary leadership models and frameworks (Bolman and Deal, 2013; Bossert et al., 1982; Hallinger, and Murphy, 1986). We chose to work with the aforementioned two, as we are more familiar with their underlying concepts and assumptions and, at the same time, they can provide a holistic and complementary approach to successful and effective school leadership if taken and examined together. Moreover, the Pashiardis-Brauckmann Holistic Leadership Framework has, so far, been validated in more than 10 countries already.
Exercising pedagogical leadership
If we define as instructional or pedagogical leadership style all the actions that refer to the interventions that leaders employ in their schools in order to improve the process of teaching and learning, then the key word here is intervention, which means it must be an action with a core purpose to improve teaching and learning. However, for successful intervention there also needs to be a focus as well as support and accountability in combination with trust (Day and Leithwood, 2007; Johansson, 2020, forthcoming). Being the pedagogical leader resonates both with what Pashiardis and Brauckmann call the instructional/pedagogical style and with what Bredeson and Johansson mean when referring to school leaders as the experts. Expert, pedagogical school leaders create and operate around instructional objectives by setting high expectations; through monitoring and evaluating students and teachers; by enabling achievement of the instructional objectives; through stimulating instructional innovation; and by carrying out pedagogical dialogues with teachers about the quality of their teaching and the kind of expectations that school leaders have from their teachers. Their leadership practices revolve around empowerment, transformation and community building, thus capitalizing on teacher leadership, which seems to play an important role in understanding school success (Donohoo, 2018; Fairman and Mackenzie 2015; Harris, 2005; Harris et al., 2017). Expert pedagogical principals are committed to making a difference for their school communities, as revealed through their resilience, commitment, persistence and sense of optimism, even in the face of very difficult challenges (Day et al., 2011).
Another important aspect of instructional/pedagogical leadership is when school leaders exercise pedagogical leadership and lead by example, emphasizing the fact that we are all eternal students who constantly fight for professional growth. We conclude that the way pedagogical leadership is operationalized in various regions of the world can be linked to acquiring higher students’ achievement as well as to improved professional growth and professional learning among staff members of the school (Hallinger and Heck, 1998; Hoy, 2012; Mangin and Dunsmore, 2015; Neumerski, 2013). Thus, the main driver is being successful through pedagogical leadership and expertise in order to reach effectiveness in children’s learning. ‘Successful’ and ‘effective’ cannot be evaluated without a clear understanding of what the activities mean for children’s learning both as individuals and as a group. However, this pedagogical leadership style cannot be effectuated unless there is the presence of organizational and cultural leadership, to which we now turn.
Exercising organizational and cultural leadership
The structuring leadership style of the Pashiardis-Brauckmann Holistic Leadership Framework stresses the fact that monitoring and adjusting the structural organization of the school, including how tasks are assigned and performed, and the proper use of time and space, are important elements in school leaders’ reorganization efforts. In many regions around the world, successful school leaders interact within a particular school context to deliver the necessary vision and strategic interventions aimed at improving student outcomes (Clarke and O’Donoghue, 2017; Donmoyer et al., 2012). In these cases, school leadership is formed by local contextual characteristics which, in turn, shape principals’ leadership practices. It is also emphasized that school leadership impacts and successful practices can take place at the input, process and output levels of the school which they are responsible for and not just at the final output level (Kasser, 2013; Shaked and Schechter, 2014).
The main difference here is the focus on structure whereas the pedagogical leadership style places more emphasis on creating and leading a school culture that can improve the pedagogical learning activities and other instructional activities at the school level. But neither of the two is good enough without the other. It is important for all principals to work towards integrating structure and culture alongside teaching and learning. There is little to be gained by only changing the structure if one is not working with culture change, guided by strategic thinking, at the same time. When the structure and culture are in harmony, then the school can perform at its best in the long term (Höög et al., 2011). Therefore, leaders need to be able to build a common trust basis which they can use as a platform for everything else they do around their schools. Building a shared strategic vision of what we want our schools to look like is another manifestation of this values-driven and trust-building aspect of expert school leadership that can make the difference at the school level and one which can guide students in order to realize and reach their full potential in education (Louis and Wahlstrom, 2011). For instance, this trust-building and values-oriented leadership is particularly emphasized within the Australian/New Zealand context, where school leaders’ values are perceived on several levels, such as the professional level and the core values about human interaction (Notman, 2014). At the same time, principals’ actions are centred around universal values, such as social justice, dignity and freedom, empathy for the less well off, compassion and tolerance. Moreover, principals in that part of the world exhibited another kind of values, that of companionship and doing things together; that is, they exercised the distributed notion of leadership. Thus, the leaders were people-centred, good at developing relationships, modelling appropriate behaviour and establishing relational trust within the organizational and cultural apparatus of the school (Gurr and Drysdale, 2016).
A more humanistic motivation for leadership among school superintendents is also reported by Merchant et al. (2020) in relation to the high number of refugees entering both Sweden and Texas in recent years. This is interesting because the researchers were looking for political advocacy and activism, but the superintendents convinced them that the activities that could be perceived as political activism from the outside were based on their humanistic values and a human rights perspective in education. Following this, the notion of participatory approaches to leadership is explored in order to find the connections between participation and structural and cultural elements.
Exercising participatory leadership and stewardship
This leadership style highlights the importance of positive and productive relationships among the various school participants and it is primarily based on trust and mutual support. Under this style, principals are responsible for creating a positive culture within their school. Simple facts such as a leader always remembering to say ‘thank you’, or to acknowledge good work, or praise effort and commitment, are some good examples of helping to create this kind of participative and distributive culture within the school boundaries (Brauckmann and Pashiardis, 2011; Harris et al., 2017). What we are suggesting here is that working on being the instructional, expert leader of the school as well as exercising this participative leadership style through a healthy working environment is indeed a crucial combination in order to have successful schools (Donohoo, 2018; Fairman and Mackenzie, 2015). Moreover, relying on a close working relationship within the school, which encourages a two-way relationship and communication between students and teachers, in a climate which is conducive to learning, can become the vital link towards effectiveness. Many times this process of creating a distributed leadership culture within the school begins with a core team of volunteer teachers who are willing to follow through and, at the same time, show the necessary resilience to do so (Day et al., 2011). Thinking about it from another perspective, leaders with a participative style and stewardship are capable of building a shared vision as a positive driving force, within an environment which supports all-round student development, thus motivating teachers and students to perform at higher levels.
This resonates with what Bredeson and Johansson (2000) refer to as being a steward. As they mention, a steward enhances the performance of their school by providing opportunities for staff to participate in decision-making about issues that affect them and for which their knowledge is crucial, and support from teachers is central in order to have good implementation of the decisions. Common features of successful school principals who operate as stewards are centred on: values and beliefs; personal qualities and skills; interventions and practices that lead to success; and capacity building. Being a steward also means being able to help, sometimes, before a staff member has asked for help, thus being proactive and humble.
What has been described above resonates well with what has been suggested by African and Asian school leaders who mentioned that their personal qualities made a very significant contribution to their success as leaders. Some of these personal attributes include being trustworthy and honest, dealing with everybody with a sense of integrity and a sense of humour, being friendly yet firm, exemplary, exhibiting commitment, being hardworking, transparent, being a good communicator, showing a sense of self-discipline, and possessing strong moral and ethical values and a sense of responsibility (Bush and Glover, 2003). But, above all, successful school leaders in the African and Asian contexts stressed the fact that a leader should always remember to say ‘thank you’ and to acknowledge good work, effort and commitment (Mestry, 2016). As was especially stressed from an Asian perspective, the new concept of invitational education was initiated by a number of school principals as a kind of successful practice; invitational education is an approach to creating, sustaining and enhancing an authentic and truly welcoming learning environment based on trust, respect, optimism and care that facilitates better learning outcomes and enables students to realize their full potential (Szeto et al., 2016). The participatory and stewardship approaches as described in this section resonate with the efforts of school leaders to become more inclusive not just inside their schools, but also with outside sources of influence
Exercising entrepreneurial and communicatory leadership
The important criterion in an entrepreneurial leadership style is indeed being capable to seize new opportunities and having the strength and tenacity to develop these into actions at the school site. This style is often combined with thinking creatively and innovatively about the future and trying to develop and improve old thinking through thinking outside the box, thus becoming an edupreneurial leader (Pashiardis and Brauckmann, 2019). By working closely with other community structures and individuals, the principals aim at providing support and advice to parents and they can often influence the community at large. When working in this fashion, leaders see themselves as more than school leaders, but also as community leaders, as social workers, as motivators, as cultural initiators and many more roles that they undertake in order to have the greatest possible impact within their communities (Jacobson and Schoenfeld, 2014). These leaders also understand that, sometimes, change is greater than in the local community. Important changes in society at large can have an impact on the local school. Changing societies can, for instance, mean changes in the general values and structural systems, which are often caused by growing social differences between more-educated people and less-educated ones or between a growing difference in income or increased number of refugees; these changes can create tensions in the social system apparatus and challenge values concepts such as solidarity and our understanding about what is redistribution of wealth within a political system. We see signs of this new situation in many parts of Europe where, currently, more focus is being placed on what society could do for you and less emphasis is on what you could do for society. In situations like this, individualism is growing and solidarity is in decline, even in countries which have traditionally placed more emphasis on the public good versus individualism, such as those in the Scandinavia region, for example. We also see that the influence of political parties on the right of the political continuum is growing; and one effect for the public school is budget cuts on one hand, and a challenge to uphold a good public system on the other. In the end it is all about doing more with less and doing it better (Pashiardis and Brauckmann, 2019), in an era of economic austerity and other challenges such as a free school market. The question is how long can this tendency last without having a permanent and negative effect on public schools (Pashiardis et al., 2016)?
At the same time, an entrepreneurial leader needs to be a good communicator. Leaders in this function create a vision which is values-driven and can be shared with all stakeholders and uses the provision of regular positive feedback which helps in motivating and inspiring the staff. The leadership practices revolve around empowerment, transformation and community building, thus capitalizing on teacher leadership (Bredeson and Johansson, 2000; Datnow and Park, 2018; Fairman and Mackenzie, 2015). Leaders as communicators go the extra mile in developing strategic alliances with the municipality, parents’ associations, the police, civil society around their areas and other perceived stakeholders in order to bring the ‘outsiders’ into their schools. In this way, they are reinforcing, informing and creating collaborators who will increase their effectiveness inside the school but from an outsider’s perspective. These principals use their ability to build trust between themselves and their staff and among the staff themselves as well. Another feature of the practices of successful schools and effective school leaders in the communicator function is to ensure continuous communication with parents, students, staff and the school governing body. All these communications have reciprocity as their main characteristic (Pashiardis and Brauckmann, 2019).
As Bredeson and Johansson (2000) further inform us, it has been documented that principals serving at the same school for several years are able to build on the trust of their faculty and their parent community in order to support the tough decisions and changes they have to make. They were trusted and supported to go through difficult terrains. This feature resonates well with what is found primarily within the North American context, where longevity of service was perceived as a clear factor as to why principals can be influential and successful (Jacobson and Schoenfeld, 2014). Over several years of serving at the same school, these principals were able to build the trust of their faculty and their parent community in order to support the tough decisions and changes they had to make. It may also be concluded that the relative stability of leadership at a school is indeed an important factor contributing towards success and effectiveness, with frequent turnovers leading to instability and potentially a lack of trust; at the same time, extremely long tenures can possibly lead to complacency and inertia (Jacobson, 2016).
Exercising personnel development and being models of learning
To be aware of the importance to develop one’s own self as well as develop the workforce is another very important leadership quality for effectiveness and success (Kearney and Herrington, 2013; Louis and Wahlstrom, 2011). Leaders who are models of learning can foster more collaboration and trust among staff through the establishment of teams and group structures within their schools. Moreover, model leaders are people-centred, good at developing relationships, modelling appropriate behaviour and establishing relational trust. More than ever before we need school leaders who are models of learners (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2019b). And because school leaders are, at heart, educators they should exemplify the power of learning upon their leadership development. Model leaders must be able to raise awareness of the cultural, social and pedagogical changes needed for the increasing diversity of the population in their schools, and thus establish successful personnel development processes in the path towards effectiveness (OECD, 2019b).
Successful and effective schools: what are they?
A successful school is one that can facilitate mobility in a society. In effect, through the school everybody gets a fair chance to develop irrespective of the socio-economic background they come from; the ‘social class ceiling’ can be broken within a successful school (Pashiardis and Johansson, 2016a). This is done through the creation of the processes and putting the systems in place that might lead to success for the individual and all fellow students irrespective of contextual variations. This is one of the reasons why, in the Swedish education system, for instance, lunch is provided for free to all students in all schools so that there is an equal treatment of all and, in some schools in challenging areas, a free breakfast is also provided. In that way society can guarantee that all students have their physical needs taken care of, as a necessary prerequisite for being able to participate in the educational process on an equal footing. To make that possible in full, even books and writing materials are provided for free. Further, the argument is that if everybody gets a free lunch, breakfast and school books and writing materials, nobody can know whether only the poor and needy get them, and, in this way, we do not jeopardize the dignity of any student.
Moreover, the uneven redistribution of monies and other resources is another way of moving towards becoming a successful school. What this means is that, in order to be successful and effective for all its students, a school needs to redistribute its monies and other resources unevenly among the various subsets of the student body, and this kind of distribution may cause some unrest among parents and teachers (Hanushek, 2019; Woessmann, 2003). In more concrete terms, what if the school decides to provide more resources to the needier children, and then the parents of middle- and upper-class students are unhappy and do not agree with this redistribution? What if they believe that their children are being treated unfairly and they do not get what they deserve as tax-payers? The answer to this question is that there is an imaginary line, a threshold that should not be crossed; if it is, then there will be unrest, and other measures taken in order to ameliorate the effects of such interventions will be viewed with suspicion in the future. Changes like these must be taken in small steps and careful processes so that they will be accepted by the middle class (Pashiardis and Johansson, 2016a). In short, Aristotle’s dictum is very useful here: the greatest inequality is the equalization of unequals. That is, treating unequal entities as equal produces injustices.
For instance, again in Sweden, it is interesting to note that more and more of the middle/upper class in this country are sending their children to private/independent schools (Johansson, 2015; Rönnström and Johansson, 2020, forthcoming). This is probably the result of them disliking the redistribution as described above which is happening in public schools in more visible and tangible ways, and they believe that there is a certain injustice being inflicted upon their children. But it could also be a sign of mistrust. In short, we need to ask ourselves, what is the threshold at which parents and the society at large will accept some income and resources redistribution, and when will they say ‘Enough is enough, and I don’t accept this policy anymore’? Therefore, defining these issues of context and resources redistribution, as well as finding out the minimally acceptable threshold, are important elements in the effort to critically examine the concepts of successful and effective schools, or one could say that the acceptance of high redistribution is linked to success (Hanushek, 2019). We can have a high redistribution policy for school children from lower social classes as long as we can show success for all; at the same time, we need to be aware of the conflict between the private and the public good. Thus, the question arises of whether, in our quest for more equality, we are putting quality in second place. This is the question about effective schools. Thus, the main question is whether our successful and equitable schools are effective at the same time.
Even the definition of what constitutes an effective school became the product of the degree to which the objectives of the school were achieved and the extent to which targeted problems were resolved. The term ‘effectiveness’, as used in our context, is determined without reference to costs, but, at the same time, effective leaders do not waste their resources on unattainable goals (Woessmann, 2003). They set realistic goals and prioritize them in order to achieve them. At the same time, when one strives for effectiveness, the processes or the means through which one achieves it are not considered so important as long as one can achieve one’s goals. The mission is to achieve the targets as set by the school and society at large. Moreover, the definition of an effective school during the current era has acquired some new content in that an effective school is the school which can prove that in its classes there is quality and equality. The definition of quality is that the school has good results or the best possible results for its students at a minimally acceptable level; the educational system decides what results are important for them (academic, citizenship, affective, a combination of them, etc.) and the minimally acceptable level at which these are considered good enough results in a particular country/society. Equality means that the various academic achievements are equitably distributed among the various subsets of the student population of the school. That is, the school teaches and educates its students irrespective of their socio-economic status (SES) and/or where they come from or which family they belong to, or their ethnic/immigrant and religious background (Edmonds, 1979; Levine and Lezotte, 1990; Lezotte, 1989; Pashiardis and Pashiardi, 2000).
From the above discussion, we return to the following questions once more. What is success? Is it related to effectiveness? Is effectiveness better measured as related to academic results or is it better to use other criteria? Does successful deal more with procedural issues and effectiveness is more related to the end result? Would this ‘division of labour’ be fairer and more justified if we stress the fact that a successful school is one that institutionalizes the right processes in order to achieve and sustain desired objectives and, thus become effective? Going a step further, could the notion of equality (as described earlier) be tied to a successful school (i.e. it is more of a process towards the goal), and the notion of quality (a minimally acceptable achievement for all, according to a society’s wishes and goals for its citizenry) be tied to an effective school? Could we say that a school is effective because it has quality results at (at least) a minimum acceptable level (however they are measured) for a number of its students? (How many students? All? Only a part of the student body?) And if, along the way, the processes to achieve these results are equitable and they lead to fair treatment of all students, does this make it also a successful school? On the other hand, could we say that an effective school is the one that produces better results which are evenly distributed to its sub-populations? That is, the school is effective with its student population irrespective of their SES, gender, ethnic/immigrant background, etc. The pendulum swing will probably reach equilibrium between these two tendencies: processes and products. Moreover, it should be stressed that, usually, the judgement about whether a school is successful comes from within the school, whereas the judgement about how effective a school is comes from the outside. Often this control from outside is related to only one aspect of effectiveness – economic results and efficiency (Rönnström and Johansson, 2020, forthcoming).
Context as the bridge between success and effectiveness
It is increasingly acknowledged that school leaders do not operate in a vacuum. On the contrary, their actions greatly depend on their perceptions of the particular context in which they operate (Bredeson et al., 2011; Hallinger, 2018). Moreover, school leaders’ actions are influenced by context and, at the same time, they try to influence context to their benefit. In essence, what we are arguing here is that the quest for leadership success and effectiveness can be better conducted at the local level, but with a global view. At the local level, effectiveness often means keeping within the administrative structures and the budget, and success is more linked to having a good climate in the school and parents that are appreciative of the school. The concrete everyday realization of school leadership has to take the context into account, as leadership is always context-specific. In general, leadership is dependent on and limited by the context (Gu and Johansson, 2012). It should be stressed that by ‘context’ we really mean the ‘immediate’ surroundings of the school or the area close to school (ACTS) (Schwarz and Brauckmann, 2015), as perceived by school leaders, and not some ‘remote’ national context which often leaves them ‘unaffected’. More specifically, the main interest lies in examining the leaders’ perceptions of their context and how this interplay produces the best ‘leadership cocktail mix’ of effective leadership behaviours and practices for the school success of all children. For example, is it 20% of the instructional style and 50% of the participative one, etc. that a leader has to adopt in order to be most effective within a particular context? And then, which specific behaviours and practices make up these percentages for each style (Pashiardis, 2014)?
Thus, school leaders need to be able to understand the complexity of the system and the complexity of the self. They need to be familiar with the potential ‘stumbling blocks’ that may exist (both within the self and within the context) and how these obstacles can become challenges that they will need to overcome. School leadership must shape the school processes and school structures and the context in a way that the teachers who work there can then ideally be more effective in supporting their pupils in order to achieve better learning outcomes. Thus, the quest for effective school leaders and effective schools continues into the modern era by trying to find out both the processes and the desired outcomes in order to have effective schools; however, primarily the current focus in school effectiveness research is still on achieving the end results for all students (Ärlestig et al., 2016).
Moreover, during the discussions and explorations about successful and effective schools, the issue of what is more important, process or products/outcomes, comes up constantly. That is, the main question with which researchers are concerned is: are processes and products equally important? How are they associated with success and effectiveness? Is context, then, the bridge between process and product? The notion here is that even if one focuses on the product (which is the current tendency in school effectiveness research), still process is important and, even more so, context is important as well (Brauckmann et al., 2020; Clarke and O’Donoghue, 2017). At the same time, we need to think and examine these two notions (process and product) from the students’ perspective. What if their individual home/context is not conducive to learning? What if they do not have a private room/office in their house to complete their homework? Then, should homework be completed at school where all students have the same opportunities and an environment which is conducive to learning (Hanushek, 2019)? Thus, should we not give homework to students because maybe their home environment and their parents cannot really help them grow academically, in the same ways as other parents and homes that can help their children better? Therefore, context (not just from the school’s point of view, but from the student’s point of view as well) is very important in how we define successful and effective schools.
By studying context, then, are we really striving to close the gap between processes and products? Then, what is context for each student? Can schools make up for the deficiencies of a student’s individual context? Is that not the whole essence of successful and effective schools? Then, are schools able to fill in for the deficiencies of society at large and the socio-economic backgrounds from which students come? Is this possible (realistic and fair for schools to take it on their shoulders) or are the schools getting themselves into a trap which is really ‘Mission Impossible’, and then they are blamed for all the ills of society? Therefore, depending on the context (its current state), one can talk more of ‘successful’ or more of ‘effective’ (Pashiardis and Johansson, 2016a).
Discussion, reflections and concluding remarks
Around the world, the pressure to perform successfully and to do that efficiently keeps increasing among the various stakeholders in education by focusing on international and comparative large-scale assessments (see, for instance, OECD, 2019a for the most recent PISA results). In fact, it cannot be considered as a coincidence that in recent years we have seen a proliferation of large-scale international assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA); the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS); the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS); the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS); the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC); the Civic Education Study (CivEd); the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS); and the Second Information Technology Education Study (SITES). These large-scale evaluation studies are one reason why we concentrate on comparing school success and drafting up league tables amongst countries. There is also another reason for the importance we place on large-scale evaluations, which is linked to school results, especially because these results have a greater impact on modern societies and what can be described as a changing labour market with much higher educational demands on the workforce. The tendency is to increasingly compare and find out the ‘best’ practices and interventions and to identify common features that help to build success in different regions around the world.
But is there a best practice and best achievement suitable for all? What is valued as best education and what is valued within education is politically and values-driven. However, politics and values are society-driven and there are vast differences from one society to another. Education systems are micro-political systems and, in this regard, they represent the culture and values of real people on the ground (Verger, 2016). Thus, it is possible that what is successful and effective in one part of the world may be ‘good enough’ in another part of the world. Depending on the level of development of a society and its educational system, what is successful and what is effective suddenly become very relative (Pashiardis et al., 2016). It really depends on the local ‘state of affairs’. At the same time, it seems that, when it comes to school leadership, there are certain commonalities that should be stressed and singled out in order to better understand the debate about successful and effective schools and school leaders. We think of policies as inspiring tools but what is also happening is that some researchers, through their books, inspire teachers and principals with their (often) simple descriptions of complex school improvement processes and policy mandates. These descriptions have a profound effect on the applied pedagogical work in schools, which is sometimes more influential than national policy decisions (Johansson and Ärlestig, 2020, forthcoming).
The first common point that can be made, based on the above discussions and analyses of views from different regions of the world, is that context and the interplay between context and the various actors at the school level are important factors. Successful and effective school leaders are aware of the broader context in the internal and external environment in which they operate, as well as of the international trends in education so that they can be adaptive and learning in order to lead. In other words, school leaders are contextually literate, have a deep knowledge and understanding of their school’s demographic situation and they act accordingly in order to meet their students’ needs (Brauckmann et al., 2020). In fact, different leadership styles and qualities are expected in a school whose ethnic composition is very diverse; different sets of behaviours and actions are probably required of an elementary, a middle school or a high school leader. Further, depending on where the school is situated (urban, suburban or rural), different constituents may have different demands of school leaders as well as different sets of expectations. It should be stressed here that this area is quite under-researched and needs further refinement and development (Pashiardis et al., 2016).
Second, we know through research that the role of the principal as a leader of leaders is a prominent one and enhances, mostly indirectly, students’ performance (Leithwood et al., 2010; Levine and Lezotte, 1990; Seashore et al., 2010). This leadership role which seems to be evident in most studies in the international literature, called instructional leadership within the USA context or pedagogical leadership in other contexts, has an impact on the quality of teaching and learning that takes place at the school level (Harris et al., 2017; Mangin and Dunsmore, 2015). As previously mentioned, instructional or pedagogical leadership refers to all the interventions that school leaders employ in their schools in order to improve the process of teaching and learning.
Third, distributed leadership seems to be another commonality irrespective of context. School leaders around the globe have probably realized the need to build collaborative structures within as well as outside their schools (Donohoo, 2018; Harris, 2005). Within the school, school leaders empower their teachers and the school’s leadership team, and embrace shared decision-making. This leadership style highlights the importance of positive and productive relationships among school participants based on trust and mutual support, as again was previously described.
Fourth, school leaders seem to be values-driven and especially trust-driven. Successful principals share a set of values (professional, social and political) that they believe in and communicate them to others (Notman, 2014). This can be seen as their personal philosophy and it is a common characteristic of leaders in different parts of the world. These values are at the personal as well as at the professional level and include a humane aspect of what it means to be a leader who is honest and real. It seems that everywhere around the world, leaders need to be able to build a common trust basis which they can use as a platform for everything else they do around their schools. Building a shared vision of what we want our schools to look like is another manifestation of this values-driven and trust-building aspect of school leadership that can make the difference at the school level and motivate students to realize and reach their full potential in education (Hammersley-Fletcher, 2015).
Finally, an important theme that we need to come to terms with is the probability that the issues of quality and equality are sometimes conflicting as goals to be achieved. That is, the more one strives for quality, the less equality there will be, and the more one strives for equality, the less quality there will be, mainly because we do not have vast resources for everything we want to do in education for everyone. Then, if this is true, what should the schools strive for? Are we not successful in public education because we are striving to achieve antithetical or contradictory and conflicting goals? How much of each of the two concepts should a society achieve in order to be balanced in the provision of education opportunities to its citizenry? We think that the answer is that we should strive for quality but, at the same time, understand that equality does not mean the same for all. Equality can never mean the same for all because we, as individuals, have different needs. Effective redistribution is the key to equality for all and also to success for all students. In sum, due to shrinking resources, politicians and education systems and societies are asking for more with less, and the blame is shifted towards politicians. Maybe this will mean a paradigm shift in order to find more equitable and redistributive ways of enhancing educational success and effectiveness.
It is increasingly obvious that more research concerning the needs of educational leaders within a specific cultural context is definitely necessary in order to prepare successful and effective school leaders. This kind of research, as Brauckmann and Pashiardis (2011) suggest, should be intensive, diagnostic and developmental in nature, in order to predict needs, and develop new approaches toward successful and effective educational leadership. This means that approaches to school leadership policy need to be based on careful considerations of the context in which schools operate. It should be borne in mind that policy initiatives that work well in one country cannot necessarily be transferred across national borders. But the so-called governing chain from national politics down to the school level must be worked on in more intensive ways. Today we see very high aspirations set in school laws but the resources given are not adjusted to the aspirations, which makes it very difficult for principals and teachers (Johansson, 2015). At the same time, a regrouping of countries and regions around the world can tell us more about existing or non-existing contextual balance of the education system. Is the quality of the educational governance cocktail mix constraining or liberating school leaders with regard to their development? What does the best mix probably look like?
A final perspective could be to try and understand successful and effective leadership as a function of structure and culture corroborated by strategic thinking and analysis. When both structure and culture are focused and in co-variance with each other on student learning, we find successful and effective schools. If structure and culture are not supporting each other we will not expect to find successful and effective schools. We claim that the reason behind this conclusion is the fact that without agreement on structure and culture, we cannot really develop the necessary strategic plan which will guide our actions on the ground. We want to believe that the preceding discussions constitute an enrichment in the grounding of more hypotheses and theoretical ideas as well as more professional development for both school principals and researchers in the area of successful and effective school leadership. However, it is further stressed that the future of the study of school leadership and its effects on student achievement is not simply through more complex statistical analyses and large-scale international studies. The way forward for the years to come is indeed to further advance through a study of the unique characteristics of the context of each educational system, its history of successful actions of leadership, culture and structure in relation to national and local needs and strategic thinking.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.