A case study on leadership styles of primary school heads in Gozo

Abstract

Educational leadership is known to be second most important in enabling the success of schools (Bush, 2007, 2011; Pont, Nusche & Hopkins, 2008; Reed, 2013; Peters, 2015). Due to this, throughout the last decades a number of leadership styles have been put forward by both international and national researchers, with the intention of improving the work of the school leaders. After studying the most prominent styles, the researcher chose an inductive approach, where he sought to find out what leadership styles the current heads of school in Malta are using or they advocate, aiming to elicit the best style/s which promote the way forward for the Maltese education system. Indeed, a case study methodology using a multi-method approach was chosen for this study, with Gozo being the catchment area. The qualitative method allowed for the interviewing of four heads of school using the Biographic-Narrative Interpretive Method (Wengraf, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2013). Moreover, the quantitative method was used with forty educators who work within the same schools of the interviewed senior leaders. These educators were given a questionnaire survey to answer. Furthermore, the two official documents: the National Curriculum Framework (Ministry of Education and Employment, 2012) and the Malta Education Strategy 2014-2024 (Ministry for Education and Employment, 2014a) were analysed to see what type of link existed between the case study results and the content of these documents. Eventually, a Thematic Field Analysis (Charmaz, 2006; Guest, MacQueen & Namey 2012) procedure followed, where eight themes emerged from this study. After consulting with the literature review, these results showed that the heads of school were contingent, in that, as advocated by researchers like Yukl (2002), Vanderhaar, Munoz and Rodosky (2007) and Bush (2015), these made use of a number of approaches from different leadership styles. At the same time, the approaches chosen acknowledged a systematic type of leadership – a style which, in lieu of the current changes, is being promoted by international researchers like Hargreaves, Halász and Pont (2007, 2008) and Peters (2015), whilst locally by Bezzina and Cutajar (2012) and the Malta Education Strategy 2014-2024 (Ministry for Education and Employment, 2014a). Consequently, this research concluded that the best way forward suggests both contingent and systematic leadership.