Principal leadership in an era of accountability: a perspective from the Hong Kong context

Abstract

This article presents the findings of a study into the leadership practices of Hong Kong principals working within an environment of increasing accountability. The study set out to investigate the relationships between sets of principal leadership practices and the levels of alignment, coherence and structure and support for students in the school. Results indicated that principals tend to emphasise the professional development of teachers and key staff as a way to strengthen alignment within the school and between school and government policies. However, findings also suggest that working in an accountability environment can have a negative impact on the support provided for students.

Keywords:

• principal
• leadership
• accountability
• Asia
• learning

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the funding support of the Research Grant Council (RGC) of Hong Kong for its support through the General Research Fund (GRF 451407).

Notes

1. School-based management has been one of the major initiatives of the primary and secondary education of Hong Kong to make the school more transparent in its operations through its incorporated management committee, which includes representatives of teachers, parents and alumni as well as independent members as school managers, apart from the de facto representatives from the sponsoring body and the principal. The committee is legally accountable to the community for their performance and proper use of funds (EDB 2010b).

2. Details of these reforms can be found on the EDB website: http://www.edb.gov.hk/index.aspx?nodeID=101&langno=1.

3. Details of the validation of the instruments were reported in our unpublished report (Ko and Walker 2010).

4. These included trust, communication among teachers, professional learning, workload of teachers and resource capacity. These will be discussed in our other papers in preparation.

5. Quantitative questionnaires were intended to collect from the whole population of 498 secondary schools. However, the actual number of schools that participated in the study dropped down to slightly over one-tenth as many schools were not willing to release the value-added data, which, though not reported here, were collected at the same time for the main study which related leadership practice with student outcomes with school conditions as mediating variables. In Hong Kong, although value-added data were collected by the EDB and prior permission to use the data was granted by the government officials, the school had the ultimate right to decide whether they would release the data to researchers. The situation is very different from that in the UK, where the public can access the value-added data as well as detailed inspection reports of individual schools. This reflects a major cultural difference in the accountability framework between the east and the west, despite the similarities they share.

6. The number of schools varies year by year, but we sent out questionnaires to all secondary schools in 2009–2010. The figure was based on the statistics available from the EDB (2010a).