Changes in education policies and the status of schools in Europe: the views of school principals from eight European countries

Abstract

Neoliberal education policies have altered the operational environments of schools and affected school principals’ job descriptions and requirements. As a result of managerialism, decentralisation and marketisation of education, principals are increasingly responsible for profitability, marketing and striving in competition, in addition to their role as pedagogical leaders. In this study, the opinions and views of European principals on the changes in the governing of education, relevance of education, educational transitions and different factors affecting coping with the demands of education are analysed. The views of the principals do not consistently reflect the structures of the national education systems. Questions related to educational equality highlighted the clearest differences. The more unequal the education system, the more important supporting the students in the weakest positions is to the principals.

Keywords:

• education policy
• comparative research
• neoliberalism
• managerialism
• school principals

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Governance of Educational Trajectories in Europe: Access, coping and relevance of education for young people in European knowledge societies in comparative perspective (2010–2013) (http://www.goete.eu/).

2. This should be taken into account when reviewing the results. The results from especially France, the Netherlands and, in particular, the UK, can be regarded as mainly approximate due to the low response rates. However, despite its extremely low response rate, the UK was included in the analysis due to its importance as a special case in this study. The shift towards neo-liberal educational policy took place earlier in the UK compared with the other seven countries, which means that the responses of UK principals reflect a longer historical perspective than those of their European counterparts.

3. Teaching methods: no statistically significant difference between country clusters. Personnel recruitment: all cluster differed significantly from each other. Admission criteria: high-level comprehensive cluster differed from the other two. Curricula: low-level comprehensive cluster differed from the other two. Financial matters: high-level comprehensive and high-level differentiated showed a significant difference (p = 0.002). Note: Games-Howell post hoc tests; differences significant at level p < 0.001 unless otherwise mentioned.

4. The suitability of PCA was assessed prior to analysis. All variables had at least one correlation coefficient greater than 0.3, the overall Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure was 0.78, with individual KMO measures varying between 0.70 and 0.88, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was statistically significant (p < 0.001). In the PCA with Varimax orthogonal rotation, three components had eigenvalues greater than one, and explained 42.5 , 15.1 and 13.0% of the total variance. The three-component solution explained 70.7 % of the total variance, and, while simple structure was not entirely attained, the solution met the interpretability criterion reasonably well.

5. Since the homoscedasticity assumption was not met and the sample sizes were unequal, a robust version of the analysis of variance (Welch’s ANOVA) was used

6. No data available from Poland.

7. The suitability of PCA was assessed prior to the analysis. All variables had at least one correlation coefficient greater than 0.3, the overall Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure was 0.82, with individual KMO measures varying between 0.75 and 0.90, while Bartlett’s test of sphericity was statistically significant (p < 0.001). In the PCA with Varimax orthogonal rotation, three components had eigenvalues greater than one and explained 42.0, 14.2 and 10.4 % of the total variance. The three-component solution explained 66.6% of the total variance. As with the PCA on factors affecting coping, a simple structure was not entirely attained but the solution met the interpretability criterion fairly well.

8. Welch’s ANOVA with Games-Howell post hoc testes was used, since the sample sizes and variances of the dependent variables were unequal.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission under the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research [grant number SSH-CT-2009-243,868].