This qualitative study examined what female principals in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two historically male-dominated cultures who are actively implementing reforms to provide women with more leadership opportunities, reported as typical elements of their daily work. The study also examined the challenges that these female principals reported in their efforts to improve the learning environment in their schools and what advice they would give to women entering the field of school leadership. The themes that emerged from the data were used to construct a grounded theory of the daily responsibilities of Saudi and Qatari female principals, the challenges that faced in fulfilling those responsibilities, and how they advised women entering principal positions to prepare to respond to those challenges.

To make their mandate more efficient, universities have to either offer services to students either produce innovation and scientific research. From this point of view it is difficult for universities to focus their attention on economic and financial performance. Instead, it is much more relevant for the university to find models of governance that are able to bring together profitability, financial sustainability, and social and communitarian commitment. Universities generate knowledge that can be used to improve the standard of economic and social life in the territorial environment. For these reasons it is important to analyze relations between university and community of reference. We found that italian universities that perform better are associated with communities able to generate individual and social welfare. Better universities have also more active and skilled student populations. Monthly data are considered for the period 2012 and 2017 for 58 italian universities. Data are collected from BES-ISTAT, Almalaurea and Center for World University Rankings-CWUR. The complex database has been realized by using KNIME mixing different sources in an original metric environment. We use panel data approach to estimate the level of italian ranking in CWUR statistics by the usage two different sets of variables: BES-ISTAT and SIOPE. The increasing in the Global International Ranking can be realized either directly by increasing the level of services and products generates, either indirectly improving the spillovers effect of universities in respect to a certain community of reference.

Goffman’s theory of total institutions and Fanon’s theory of violence were used to explain student protests and violence in Kenyan secondary schools. Youth violence around the world is not a new phenomenon. However, the persistence, frequency, and intensity of violence, and their consequences beg for logical explanations and remedies. This study was part of a three-year project facilitated through the Networked Improvement Community partnership for self-study and intervention. Although a holistic approach to research was applied, data for this study were gathered through narrative inquiry. Participants (teachers, principals, and members of the school community) were identified purposively using the snowball process. Data were analyzed through deductive and inductive reasoning. Findings indicate a preponderance of student protest and violence among students in boarding schools. Student violence was a response to the devaluing and oppressive environment in boarding schools which resembled total institutions, and students exercising democratic rights to protest. The paper argues that school authorities could mitigate violent protests by providing formal political means of representation and democratic decision-making; creating new spaces for negotiation and peaceful protest; listening to the voices of students; and engaging in dialogue to create a common vision and mission.

Indonesia has achieved equal parity in access to education, income, and career opportunities. Yet in many parts of the country, female academic leaders are still highly under-represented in top academic boards. This study examines how fourteen (14) Indonesian female higher education academic leaders (FALs) enact identity salience and agency in performing their duties, while experiencing social control schemas or ‘triple binds’—exigencies of gender roles, unequal power-plays due to social status and positions, and lack of organizational resources and capital in higher education—in Indonesia, one of the world’s emerging economies still consolidating democracy and building necessary social, fiscal, and physical infrastructures. Taken as a whole, the study found the ‘triple binds’ as aggregate constraints for female leadership progression, driving female academic leaders to resist and rise above this discursive struggle and confrontation through sense-making, assertiveness, depth of conviction, a take-charge attitude, and the use of other tactical strategies like networking with key gatekeepers to obtain the resources they need. The study presents a framework of the triple binds that university leaders can use to assess constraints to academic leadership.

According to many studies teachers’ reception has been associated with the smooth operation of the school, the professional development of the teaching staff and the provision of optimal teaching work. Despite its significance and its attention from scholars, though, its implementation at schools has been facing challenges and hardships. The present study focuses on the role played by principals and teachers’ associations upon the reception and acclimatization of all newly appointed teachers in their schools. The findings indicate that the favorable disposition and actions of both principals and the teachers’ association in terms of receiving/acclimatizing any newly appointed teachers should be further enhanced.

This article analyses the strategies of the four United Kingdom (UK) nations to mitigate the impacts of primary school closures and the shift to remote learning due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. A theoretical framework based on a combination of the field literature of strategy and public value was developed to analyze their initiatives. This is a qualitative and exploratory study, and its data was collected from each country’s website, research papers, and media news. The findings reveal five key areas of action: remote learning; keeping schools open to assist vulnerable students and key workers’ children; access to the Internet and electronic devices to mitigate the digital divide; free meals to disadvantaged learners; and students’ assessment. The analysis suggests that the four nations initially adopted a coordinated action and gradually followed three different paths: deliberate strategies, adjustment to the pandemic situation, and development of emergent strategies. The variegate of strategies show the innovative capacity of the countries and the search for public value. Further research is suggested to address the impact of the strategies.

Theories of distributed leadership suggest that organizational learning and change results not from the efforts of a single individual, but rather from a network of people working within their broader systems. Team empowering leadership enhances human resources development of the organization to promote the sharing of knowledge that is necessary for change. In this study, we study transformational and distributed leadership team that have been linked to improving working conditions and students’ learning in high-needs schools. Specifically, we highlight a team-based intervention where positive organizational improvements were made to academically struggling schools, and then qualitatively examined the associated processes to understand what enabled the occurrence of those positive changes. We find that the team structure allowed for the clarification of expectations, enhancement of communication, and improvement of educator working conditions through professional development support and distribution of leadership responsibility, which ultimately resulted in improvement in school culture and performance.

Focusing on servant leadership and its outcomes are considered fairly essential in terms of its contribution to the literature. This study seeks to determine the relationships between the servant leadership of school principals and the loyalty of teachers to their principals and the constructs of loyalty to supervisors. Secondary school teachers working in Diyarbakır constitute the population of the study. 26 secondary schools were randomly selected from Diyarbakır province and the scales were applied to the teachers working in these schools. The sample consists of 202 teachers. The data were obtained with servant leadership and loyalty to supervisor scales. Validity and reliability analyzes were performed on the scales to determine whether the scales were valid and reliable or not. While analysing the data, descriptive statistics, correlation, and regression analyzes were used, respectively. It was found that the variables examined in the study had a positive and significant relationship. Regression analysis findings revealed that servant leadership predicted loyalty to supervisors and the constructs of loyalty to supervisors (dedication, extra effort, attachment, identification, and internalization) in a statistically significant way. School principals wishing to establish a sense of loyalty in schools are recommended to be aware of the positive role of servant leadership on psychological mechanisms and to have speeches and actions compatible with this type of leadership.

This study investigates the quality of higher education institutes’ (HEIs’) administrative services by assessing student satisfaction in the context of Total Quality Management (TQM). Differences between students’ perceptions and expectations of administrative service quality are examined and discussed. A questionnaire survey was developed employing the SERVQUAL service quality model, the results of which were further enhanced by the application of importance-performance analysis (IPA). All five dimensions of the model were explored (reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy, and responsiveness) with data from the 104 students from five Greek HEIs who participated in the survey. The results of the IPA complemented the survey research by enabling recommendations for importance and performance. The study’s findings indicate that students’ expectations are not met by the administrative services provided at the time of examination. A gap is observed between perceptions and expectations on all dimensions, indicating the necessity to make improvements to enhance service quality.

The study aims to determine the relationship between school administrators’ paternalistic leadership behaviours and teachers’ work alienation levels. The research sample group involves 205 teachers working in the Anatolian high schools in the central district of Siirt. Research data was collected through the “Paternalistic Leadership Behaviours Scale of School Principals” and the “Work Alienation Scale”. According to the descriptive and Pearson correlation analysis results of the research, it was determined that the paternalistic leadership behaviours of the school administrators are at a “strongly agree” level while the work alienation of the teachers is at a “somewhat agree” level, and a negative moderate significant relationship was found between the paternalistic leadership behaviours and the teachers’ work alienation levels. The path analysis revealed that benevolent leadership predicts the powerlessness and meaninglessness dimension negatively significantly; authoritarian leadership predicts the powerlessness dimension positively significantly, and moral leadership predicts meaninglessness and self-estrangement negatively significantly. Moreover, it was also established that, in general, paternalistic leadership behaviours predict the teachers’ work alienation negatively significantly as a whole. As a result of the research, school administrators were suggested to display helpful and ethical behaviours by watching over the teachers in various matters.

Educators in non-formal education organizations are often expected to display values of volunteering and giving to the community. These contributions, which are beyond the call of duty, are defined as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). When such behavior is performed as a result of pressure rather than out of free will, that pressure is defined as citizenship pressure (CP). Building on the job demands-resources theory, the study examined a moderator-mediator model at the team level construct, to explore whether team CP mediates the relationship between both idealized influence behavior and idealized influence attributed (transformational leadership dimensions) and team OCB, and whether that mediation is moderated by organizational identification. The study sample consisted of 75 teams of educators and their direct superiors, who work in 11 youth movements. Results show that the negative relationship between both idealized influence behavior and idealized influence attributed and team CP is moderated by organizational identification. Furthermore, results show a negative relationship between team CP and team OCB. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

The current case study examines secondary school principals’ social justice leadership (SJL) based on teachers’ perceptions. In the study, a qualitative research approach with a phenomenological design was used to explore the teachers’ perceptions regarding their principals’ SJL at Turkish secondary schools. The data were reached through semi-structured interviews. 11 participant teachers were determined as participants of the study with the maximum sampling method. The collected data were analyzed with content analysis, and three themes were reached: limited social justice, inclusive perspectives, and holistic leaders. Based on the results, teachers think that principals have a limited SJL and inclusion enactment. The participant teachers think that SJL should have a holistic perspective, including parents and teachers while ensuring social justice at school.

There is little empirical evidence that convinces the effectiveness of distributed leadership in contemporary educational research. Thus, many distinguished scholars suggest its’ statistical examination. Considering this need, the primary purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of principals’ distributed leadership practices on students’ learning outcomes at Technical and Vocational Education Training schools in Eritrea. The study was conducted based on quantitative design and applied structural equation modelling. A sample of six hundred and three students was employed. The researcher developed the structural equation model to test a model that hypothesized the relationship between the major variables using path analysis. The study results demonstrate that the principals’ distributed leadership practice has a direct and significant (.883, p<.001) effect on students’ learning outcomes keeping other things constant. The strongest predictor of students’ learning outcomes was capacity building, given it has the largest path coefficient (β=.346). Moreover, findings show gender disparity among the respondents and in terms of turnout rate; nevertheless, it was not statistically significant (p<.001). One of the study’s contributions is that it developed and assessed the validity of the principals’ distributed leadership practice scale for Eritrea’s TVET schools through CFA model. The study offered basic evidence that distributed type of leadership is a significant predictor of learning outcomes by exploring six factors of leadership practices, which shows a promising area for practice and future studies.

Research has shown that school leaders’ engagement in teacher induction is vital for establishing supportive school structures and conditions that are conducive to successful socialization and long-term sustenance of newly qualified teachers (NQTs). In Malta, the problem of teacher recruitment and a growing attrition rate is becoming very acute. This article describes findings from an exploratory qualitative study that examined the perceptions of five heads of schools regarding their engagement in the induction and mentoring programs that have been designed to support NQTs in Malta. The findings describe the ways through which the heads of school support NQTs and their advice for new heads of schools working with NQTs. The article offers a discussion of research results in relation to the extant literature and concludes with implications for practice and further research.

Turnover in middle management can be very expensive for a school, not just financially, but also in terms of providing continuity of leadership, sustainability of management practices, and quality student experiences. Therefore, a rigorous understanding of why middle managers in schools are thinking of leaving post can provide senior leaders an opportunity to develop strategies to reduce this turnover cost. Using the case of Lady Agatha’s Boarding School in England, this paper uses a novel approach to investigate the complexities of school middle management from a social perspective, arguing that by using a Bordieuan lens, researchers can investigate the complex matrix nature of working in middle management. By using the Bordieuan tools of field, habitus, doxa, capital, and symbolic violence, researchers can observe the struggles that the middle managers engage in to acquire capital or resources compared to other actors in the field, as tournaments of socio-political dominance. By using this original ontological turn in analysing turnover antecedents, researchers as well as practitioners could make significant impacts in the way turnover can be understood and its costs mitigated.

Teachers are expected to influence the development of certain attributes, including courtesy, discipline, accountability, and diligence among learners. These attributes echo the basic premise of the child-friendly school framework (CFS) and the ideology of sustainable learning environments. In order for teachers to contribute towards efficacy in schools and in instructional activities, studies indicate that they should be satisfied. However, it has been revealed that in some Lesotho secondary schools, teachers are not happy with their jobs. The reported teachers’ discontent adversely affects their commitment and enthusiasm. In order to reveal the causes of teacher job dissatisfaction in some Lesotho secondary schools, this study adopted a narrative qualitative approach design. This approach was ideal as it enabled 10 purposively identified teachers in Leribe and Maseru to freely narrate their lived experiences. The Herzberg duality theory (HDT) and the Transformational leadership theory (TLT) were adopted as the philosophical underpinning for this study. The inductive thematic analysis approach was used to analyse the data generated for this study. The findings suggest that teacher job dissatisfaction in some Lesotho secondary schools is caused by factors such as the use of resources for personal gain, lack of maintenance, intolerance, and habitual absenteeism among principals. The findings further suggest that strategies including teacher involvement, impartiality, and external school auditing could reduce teacher job dissatisfaction and instead create the opposite effect.

This study examines the characteristics, challenges, and strategies of school leadership in Cambodian high schools, with a focus on leadership in resource-constrained settings. Using a qualitative case study approach, the research investigates how principals in six northwestern provinces implement leadership practices to improve educational outcomes. Data were collected through semi structured interviews with 21 principals and analyzed via thematic analysis. Key findings reveal that visionary approaches, collaborative cultures, data-driven decision-making, and resilience characterize effective leadership. Challenges such as limited resources, variable teacher quality, and insufficient professional development hinder progress. The study contributes to educational leadership theory by highlighting the critical role of tailored leadership development programs and resource management in transforming underperforming schools. Practical implications include recommendations for policymakers to expand leadership training, enhance community engagement, and prioritize funding for underperforming schools. This research offers valuable insights for improving leadership in post conflict and resource-limited educational contexts.