In recent decades, ICT have found their way into all areas of life and work and increasingly represent a challenge for schools (e.g. KMK, 2016, Voogt et al., 2018). Nowadays, school management is also often closely linked to the use of ICT. Although digital media to support management and coordination processes now have an important place in companies as well as in schools, it is still largely unexplored how school stakeholders, especially school leaders - who play a key role in the context of integrating ICT in schools (e.g. Eickelmann & Gerick, 2018) - use these technologies to manage and develop schools. This is of relevance on two levels: One the one hand, the nature of work of school management can directly be shaped by the use of ICT. On the other hand, the overall climate at school towards ICT and the “ICT capacity” can be influenced by the actions of the school leader in that domain (Abdullah et al., 2013; Anderson & Dexter, 2005; Ottestad, 2013).

Against this background, this contribution addresses the following questions:

1. How often do school leaders use ICT for different school management and leadership activities?

2. To what extent can different types of 'digital' school management be identified?

For our study, we defined various domains of activity in which ICT can be used. These were derived from frameworks for leadership responsibilities in schools (Pont et al., 2008) as well as frameworks for school improvement activities from the Germanic context (Rolff, 2005). The resulting domains are organizational development, improvement of classroom instruction, staff development, development of partnerships and collaborative networks and technological improvements. Taken together, these domains form a framework for school improvement. They are tied to educational leadership as “the ultimate cohesive driver” (Fullan, 2012, p. 70) and orchestrating instance. Furthermore, they are linked to the formally assigned tasks and domains of activity of school principals. The afore-mentioned domains therefore serve as categories of analysis in the study presented forthwith.

To answer the two questions, secondary analyses of the data for Germany from the school principal survey of the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS 2018; Eickelmann et al., 2019) were conducted. First, descriptive statistics on ten items were reported (five-point answer format from Never to Every Day). These statistics were used to determine how often school leaders use ICT for different school management and leadership activities, e.g., communication with teachers or data management, organization and analysis. For the secondary analyses using the IEA-IDB-Analyzer (Rutkowski et al., 2010), weighting was applied to the target population of eighth-graders (n=3,655) focused in ICILS 2018. In order to answer the second research question, a latent class analysis with the school principal data (n=194) using Mplus (Muthen & Muthen, 2012) was carried out on the basis of these items in order to identify possible types of 'digital' school management. Various model comparison measures were used to assess the model quality (Akaike, 1974; Schwarz, 1978).

The findings on the first research question show that school leaders make frequent use of ICT for different school management and leadership activities. About three-quarters (73.9% and 76.4%) of eighth-graders in Germany, for example, attend a school where school leaders use ICT daily to communicate with teachers or to search for information on the Internet or in a network provided by the school authority. With regard to the second question, a 2-class solution describes the data best. Thus, it is possible to identify two different types of 'digital' school management. Over half of the school leaders (56%) have the highest probability of being categorized into cluster 1, 44 percent in cluster 2 More than half (56%) of the school leaders can be assigned to Class 1, which is characterized by a high use of ICT in only some particular management and leadership activities such as communicating with authorities or looking up data in a database – activities for which ICT must often inevitably be used. School leaders who can be assigned to Class 2 (44%) use ICT more frequently in all school management and leadership activities compared to the principals in Class 1. Their use of ICT can be characterized as a comprehensive approach. The findings will be discussed against the background of current European discourses on the role of school management and leadership in the context of the digitalization of schools and teaching and the relevance of 'digital' school management for teaching and learning at school (e.g. Tulowitzki & Gerick, 2018). Specifically, knowledge on ICT use in the context of school management in the Nordic countries (Ottestad, 2013) as well as more general, European data on ICT in schools in Europe (Deloitte, 2019; Wastiau et al., 2013) will form points of comparison and deliberation for further research.

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