An examination of selected dimensions of national school principals’ concerns for school administrative issues

Summary

Determining the purposes and intentions of administrative behaviour has remained problematic despite intensive research on the work behaviour of administrators. The various research methods do however provide a wealth of data on activities, locations and with whom administrators interact. This data provides a means to determine the administrative attention to different issues. Research on National School principals’ work behaviour shows that principals devote over one‐third of their activities to administrative issues, another third to pupil‐related issues and under one‐fifth to curricular and instructional issues. Fewer than one‐in‐five of the latter were with teachers. Meetings were the common means for attending to each of the three main issue areas. A major proportion of the remaining attention to pupil‐related issues was through supervision and to curricular and instructional issues through teaching. While the majority of principals’ attention was self‐initiated, a significant proportion was scheduled especially for supervision and teaching. Principals need to examine their patterns of administrative attention to see if it accords with their stated goals and values. The need for the provision of certain administrative skills would seem necessary if the patterns emerging from this research are not what principals’ perceive as their pattern of attention.