Challenges facing school principals: Problems and solutions

There is widespread evidence of the demands facing school principals in many parts of the world, illustrated recently by the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the normative preference for shared and distributed leadership in many contexts, principals retain the main accountability for school improvement and for student learning and welfare. The universal requirement for schools to be led by heads or principals reflects the importance of this role, and the pressures facing these senior leaders in most countries. These demands are particularly challenging in those many countries that do not provide specialised preparation or training for current or prospective principals. In the first paper in this issue, Mireia Tintore and colleagues present the findings of a scoping review of the problems and challenges faced by school leaders. They reviewed articles, books and book chapters, using keywords ‘problems’ and ‘challenges’, linked to principal or head teacher, finding 1138 sources potentially relevant to the review. The authors identify the main conflicts facing principals, including balancing system demands with leadership for learning, navigating pressures for autonomy and accountability and increasing pressures from families and the wider society. They conclude that the role of principals continues to be challenging. Marcus Pietsch, Pierre Tulowitzki and Colin Cramer report the findings of a study of principal ambidexterity in Germany, noting the need to simultaneously pursue exploitation and exploration. They also examine the relationship between these dimensions and the degree of competition between schools. They surveyed 405 principals from across the country. They report that these principals were more exploitative than explorative, and attribute this to inter-school competition and the need for schools to survive and, preferably, to flourish. While principals are central to school improvement, it is widely recognised that their impact is mostly indirect, via teachers. In the second paper focusing on Germany, Andre Meyer, Dirk Richter and Viola Hartung-Beck examine the relationship between principal leadership and teacher collaboration. The authors sampled 630 primary and secondary school teachers in one of Germany’s federal states. They found that teachers rated their principals’ instructional and staff development activities to be below average, despite the view that higher collective efficacy is reported where principals are involved in these activities. They conclude that principals rarely find sufficient time to devote to teachers’ professional development. Despite the ongoing emphasis on principal leadership, there is also increasing interest in shared models, such as distributed and participative leadership. A similar construct is democratic leadership, discussed by Monika Pazur in respect of Zagreb, a rare contribution to school leadership research in Croatia. The author claims that democratic leadership is oriented towards consensus with the leading process being shared between participants. Following ‘expert validation’, and a Editorial