Valstybinė bendrojo ugdymo mokyklų vadovų politika: nuoseklumas ir sėkmė trijų vyriausybių laikotarpiu ; State's school headmaster policy consistency and success through three governments period

Abstract

At the end of 2019, there were 246 schools in Lithuania without permanent school headmasters. It is a quarter of all general education schools in Lithuania. Until February 1, 2020, alone an additional 121 tenders were announced. This number may continue to grow as new competitions for the post of the outgoing school principal are published regularly. A well-prepared, professional and knowledgeable school headmaster has a significant positive impact on school outcomes for both teachers and students. Therefore, the concern about the lack of headmasters in Lithuanian schools is justified. Negative communicative attention and political pressure contribute to the desire to resolve such a situation as soon as possible. In order not to manage the situation temporarily, but for long-term positive changes in the chain of school headmasters, it is necessary to assess the consistency and success of recent changes in this area. The consistency of the state policy of headmasters will be assessed at two levels - administrative and ideological. The evaluation at the administrative level will be performed by analysing the changes in the legal acts regulating the state management policy. The assessment of ideological policy consistency will be based on the types of leadership highlighted by Ellen Daniëls, Annie Hondeghema and Filip Dochyb, which have been the most prominent in recent decades: instructional, situational, transformational and distributed. Policy success will be measured by the model developed by David Marsh and Allan McConnel, which encompasses three different dimensions of policy success: process, political, and programmatic. Research examining policy success has received increasing attention over the past decade. An empirical study of the work has shown that while national headmaster policy may be considered more consistent throughout individual governments, it is more inconsistent in general. The work also provided new empirical knowledge on the policy success of national headmaster policy. Although these assessments vary widely (from failure to success) across different dimensions of success in different governments, the overall evaluation of policy success varies slightly more towards success (2.5(6) points). At the end of the work, practical recommendations for the improvement of school leaders' policy are presented.