Most educational leadership concepts include what is called by Sun & Leithwood (2015) direction-setting leadership practices. Central to direction setting are practices aimed at identifying and articulating “goals”, “visions”, and “missions”(Sun & Leithwood, 2015). In this paper the direction setting is conceptualized as alignment between mission, vision, and goals in school improvement plans (hereinafter SIP). The limitation of previous studies (Allen et al., 2018; Gurley et al., 2015) is a poor linkage between general mission and vision statements to more specific goal setting. According to Hallinger & Heck (2002) the real power of school improvement is in the synergy of vision and goals. 

The purpose of the research was to analyze the alignment of schools’ visions, missions, and goals in school improvement in an Estonian context and it was guided by the following research questions: 

1. How much variability is there in the types of topics articulated across mission and vision statements in SIPs?
2. What characterizes the focus and type of goals set in SIPs?
3. What are the school direction setting types based on their topics in mission and vision statements and their goal foci and types?

According to the conceptual framework the direction setting consists of aligned statements about school mission, vision and goals. The school mission states the fundamental purpose of the school to exist, and this may arise from topics about students' development, integration to community or school environment (Stemler et al., 2011). The goals describe the route to improve teaching and learning or management issues (Caputo & Rastelli, 2014; Robinson & Gray, 2019; Sinnema & Robinson, 2012). The goals could be specified with four types - specific and vague performance, task and organizational learning goals (Sinnema & Robinson, 2012), but not all of them support the whole school improvement.  Then the performance goals are focused on the achievement of a specific outcome and task completion goal involve solving problems that are already well structured by existing regulation, policy, or budgetary parameters (Sinnema & Robinson, 2012), the learning goal focuses on the “discovery of the strategies, processes or procedures to perform the task effectively” (Latham & Locke, 2007). Finally, the direction setting should envision the desired future for the schools (Allen et al., 2018, Gurley et al., 2015) The analysis of direction setting is valuable to understand how the schools are solving the dilemmas to set their direction which supports their integration to community with the unique contribution.  

The research context is Estonia, where the education system has been based on the general policy approach of trust by the central government in the professional expertise of the educational institutions. Estonian principals have the highest degree of autonomy in Europe (OECD, 2019). Estonian case could be valuable for Eastern European countries with similar background (like Soviet period, re-organization of the society after the re-independence). The Estonian school leader’s competence model emphasizes the role of school leaders in improving the teaching and learning culture and adopting a pedagogical leadership style that supports the learning and development of students and teachers (Education and Youth Board, 2016). Estonian students have performed highly in PISA; however, the results of various studies in Estonian contexts have shown that school improvement issues are not equally important to all schools, and SIPs are often merely formal documents (Kukemelk, 2015; Türk et al., 2011; Urb, 2015).

The research was done by using document content analysis. The documents analysed are school improvement plans obtained from the publicly available schools’ websites in Estonia from January to April 2021. According to the Basic Schools and Upper Secondary Schools Act (2010) the school principal is obliged to arrange the publication of the plan on the school website. This study used a combined multistage sampling technique. In the first stage, we created strata based on the county the school is located in and identified the sampling frame (10-15%) based on the Statistics Estonia (2021) database. In each strata we randomly selected 70-90% schools from the list of schools published in the County website. Before including the school into the sample it was checked if the school met the following SIP criteria - the school has SIP available in the public website and it has described the mission, vision and goal statements. In the second stage, we evaluated the variability of sampled schools based on their number of students and teacher and school owner. Based on this evaluation the clustering criteria was defined to select the final 10-30% of schools. The schools from the alphabetical list in county websites were systematically analyzed school-by-school according to the clustering criteria. Eventually we reached a sample of 11% Estonian schools, where the school characteristics reflect the general population of schools in Estonia. The content analysis focused on the direction setting statements in SIPs. We used standard categories for the analysis of missions and visions created by Stemler et al. (2011) and used in other similar studies (Allen et al., 2018; Chapple, 2015). The coding schema for analysing goal statements was created by Sinnema and Robinson (2012) to analyse the goal focus and it has seven categories. After two rounds of parallel coding and discussions to agree the division of goals by 3 persons, the modified categories were created. With the aim to analyse the alignment of direction setting elements the schools were grouped based on 4 characteristics: topics in their mission and vision statements, focus of the goals, type of the goals. The division of statements into the categories were calculated using the functionality of excel spreadsheet. As a result of filtering the schools the 6 types of direction setting were defined.

The findings of the study demonstrated the great variety of topics that schools articulated in their vision and mission statements and showed the dominance of vague performance oriented goal setting. It is remarkable that in our study we did not find the school with direction set for the enhancement of learning, whose direction setting would have been at the same time inspiration about student development, which would have supported goals set about teaching and learning in a manner which gives concrete framework for achieving and evaluating them. The majority of schools (58%) can be characterized with confused direction setting. These are schools, who have set mostly teaching and learning goals, but their mission is emphasizing other topics than student development. Surrenders (7%) differ from the confused schools because their focus is on vaguely set management goals. The traditionalist direction setting is inherent to schools (18%) having a mission and vision focusing on different aspects than student development. The majority of their goals are about teaching and learning, but these goals are described as vague performances, or these goals are one-person-tasks. Schools with scorer direction setting (7%) are different from other schools because of their goal setting, which has resulted in more concrete and measurable goals, but not so much about teaching and learning. Promising direction setting is characteristic to schools (11%) who have prevailed their goals to teaching and learning. This study´s conceptual framework and the typology based on it proved to be valuable for analyzing and evaluating the alignment of visions, missions, and goals. The typology can be used to further investigate the engagement of stakeholders in improvement planning in order to facilitate a more comprehensive view of how different types of schools decide their directions.

Allen, K.-A., Kern, M. L., Vella-Brodrick, D., & Waters, L. (2018). Understanding the Priorities of Australian Secondary Schools Through an Analysis of Their Mission and Vision Statements. Educational Administration Quarterly, 54(2), 249–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X18758655 Caputo, A., & Rastelli, V. (2014). School improvement plans and student achievement: Preliminary evidence from the Quality and Merit Project in Italy. Improving Schools, 17(1), 72–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480213515800 Chapple, J. (2015). Mission accomplished? School mission statements in NZ and Japan: what they reveal and conceal. Asia Pacific Education Review, 16(1), 137–147. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-015-9360-2 Given, L. (2008). The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909 Gurley, D. K., Peters, G. B., Collins, L., & Fifolt, M. (2015). Mission, vision, values, and goals: An exploration of key organizational statements and daily practice in schools. Journal of Educational Change, 16(2), 217–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-014-9229-x Hallinger, P., & Heck, R. (2002). What Do You Call People With Visions? The Role of Vision, Mission and Goals in School Leadership and Improvement (pp. 9–40). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0375-9_2 Henry, G. (1990). Practical Sampling. SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412985451 Kukemelk, H. (2015). Estonian School System Strategic Leadership «Effects» on School Performance. Journal of Educational, Cultural and Psychological Studies (ECPS Journal), 0(11), 57–69. https://doi.org/10.7358/ecps-2015-011-kuke Latham, G. p., & Locke, E. a. (2007). New Developments in and Directions for Goal-Setting Research. EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGIST, 12(4), 290. OECD. (2019). TALIS 2018 Results (Volume I): Teachers and School Leaders as Lifelong Learners. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/1d0bc92a-en Robinson, V., & Gray, E. (2019). What difference does school leadership make to student outcomes? Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 49(2), 171–187. Sinnema, C. E. L., & Robinson, V. M. J. (2012). Goal Setting in Principal Evaluation: Goal Quality and Predictors of Achievement. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 11(2), 135–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2011.629767 Stemler, S. E., Bebell, D., & Sonnabend, L. A. (2011). Using School Mission Statements for Reflection and Research. Educational Administration Quarterly, 47(2), 383–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X10387590 Sun, J., & Leithwood, K. (2015). Direction-setting school leadership practices: A meta-analytical review of evidence about their influence. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 26(4), 499–523. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2015.1005106 Türk, K., Haldma, T., Kukemelk, H., Ploom, K., Irs, R., & Pukkonen, L. (2011). Üldharidus- ja kutsekoolide tulemuslikkus ja seda mõjutavad tegurid (p. 224). Tartu Ülikool, Haridus- ja teadusministeerium. https://www.riigikantselei.ee/sites/default/files/content-editors/TOF/TOF_uuringud/10_koolitulemusjuhtimine20111.pdf Urb, M. (2015). Arengukava koostamine ja juhtkonna liikmete tõlgendused sellele üldhariduskooli näitel. [Master thesis, University of Tartu]. http://dspace.ut.ee/bitstream/handle/10062/48323/maarja_urb.pdf