Session Information
26 SES 11 B, Policy Context and Governance in Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
Traditionally, the Swedish principal has been regarded “the first among equals” (Ullman, 1997), as part of the teaching profession rather than a profession in its own right. The emergence of New Public Management (NPM) in Sweden and numerous other countries brought changes in the organizational structure of welfare production and introduced new roles for principals, emphasizing “keeping budgets, improving results and increasing competitiveness” (Jarl et al., 2012: 429). This has been described as a discursive shift, with “transformations both in the practices of school headship and in the ways that school heads think and talk about their role” (Gewirtz and Ball, 2000: 253). One way of framing this development is in terms of an increased emphasis on educational accountability (Leithwood, 2001), more specifically external accountability (Elmore, 2005). Wermke et al. (2022) argue that Finnish and Norwegian principals have less decision-making capacity and are subjected to less control than their Swedish counterparts (particularly in the case of Finland, with an autonomous teaching profession and fewer controlling stakeholders). For Swedish school leaders, the combination of extended decision-making requirements and extended external control poses “risks of failures for which the principals will be made accountable" (Wermke et al., 2022: 745).
This paper explores how Swedish school leaders perceive their role in relation to teachers’ assessment, grading and accountability. In doing so, the paper seeks to interrogate how school leaders navigate in a landscape characterized by leadership ideals promoting distributed orientations to leadership; and a policy context permeated by notions of external accountability. The following research questions are posed:
- Which leadership practices do school leaders account for in relation to assessment and grading?
- Which leadership ideals are manifested in school leaders’ account of their leadership practices?
- How do these leadership ideals align with an accountability-driven policy context?
In Sweden, the issue of grade inflation has been a matter of public and political debate for some time (Riksrevisionen, 2022), not least in relation to the marketized school system (Lundahl et al., 2013). According to the Swedish School Act, the principal is to ensure that teachers’ grading is carried out in line with legislation. At the same time, the principal’s mandate in relation to the actual grading procedure is very limited and is almost exclusively the teacher’s domain. Nonetheless, the Swedish National Agency for Education states that “the principal has a key role in teacher’s efforts towards fair and equivalent grades” (Skolverket, 2022: 23). Recently, new regulation regarding grading was introduced, which increases the scope for the professional judgment of teachers in relation to the syllabus. In the government bill (Prop. 2021/22:36) preceding the new legislation, the notion that the reform will have consequences for principals is mentioned only briefly and without specifying what these consequences are, thus reinforcing the sense of ambiguity and unclarity regarding the role of the school leader with regards to assessment and grading.
With their dominant position in the public policy debate, leadership theories are here described in terms of leadership ideals (Ek Österberg and Johansson, 2019), with different normative statements about the role of the leader. The leadership ideals which resonate with principals may align more or less with the policy context at hand, specifically a policy context where external accountability is a prominent feature. The study presented in this paper sheds light on the potential conflict between the principal’s task to act as a both a manager and a pedagogical leader – a task which the principal is to be held accountable for – and the mandate and objectives to fulfil that task in practice.
Method
The empirical material used in the study includes two focus group discussions with principals and assistant principals. Some of the participants are responsible solely for secondary school and some for both primary and secondary school. Out of these units, one is an independent school (private school with public funding) and the others are schools run by the municipality. Whilst operating in the same national policy context, the school leaders operate in varying geographical context, including both rural and urban municipalities. The discussions were semi structured and addressed matters such as how the school leaders gather information about the assessment and grading practices of teachers at their school/s, structures regarding assessment and grading, and dilemmas arising with regards to the issue at hand. The empirical material will be categorized according to which leadership practices can be discerned in the school leaders’ accounts of their role in relation to assessment and grading. Thereafter, the leadership practices described will be analysed with regards to which leadership ideals they can be associated with. Finally, the leadership ideals prevalent in the material will be related to policy context and the question of the extent of alignment between the leadership ideals and the policy context will be discussed.
Expected Outcomes
Preliminary results point at a varying degree of direct involvement with teachers’ assessment and grading on behalf of the school leaders. In some cases, the responsibility is delegated to the so called first teacher and in others, the school leader participates in discussions with teacher teams on assessment and grading. Throughout the focus group discussions, protecting and ensuring teacher autonomy is accentuated. Furthermore, the school leaders raise the importance of creating beneficial conditions and structures for collegial discussion and co-assessment among teachers, more so than pointing at measures for following up and evaluating assessment and grading. Leadership ideals manifested in the school leaders’ account are directed towards distributed forms of leadership, characterized by trust and distribution of power and responsibility. Whilst not raised by the school leaders themselves, this may pose challenges in terms of external accountability.
References
Elmore RF (2005) Accountable Leadership. The Educational Forum, 69: 134-142. Ek Österberg E and Johansson V (2019) Ledarskapsideal i förändring – det finns inga ledare utan styrsystem [Leadership ideals in transition – there are no leaders without governing systems]. In: Bergström T and Eklund N (eds) Ett annorlunda ledarskap : Chef i politiskt styrd verksamhet [A different kind of leadership : Managing politically governed agencies]. Lund: Studentlitteratur, pp. 55-77. Gewirtz S and Ball S (2000) ‘From ‘‘Welfarism’’ to ‘‘New Managerialism’’: Shifting Discourses of School Leadership in the Education Marketplace’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 21(3), 253–268. Jarl M, Fredriksson A and Persson S (2012) New Public Management in Public Education: A Catalyst for the Professionalization of Swedish School Principals. Public Administration 90(2): 429–444. Leithwood K (2001) School leadership in the context of accountability policies. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 4(3): 217-235. Lundahl L, Erixon Arreman I, Holm A-S and Lundström U (2013) Educational marketization the Swedish way. Education Inquiry, 4(3): 497-517. Prop. 2021/22:36. Ämnesbetyg – betygen ska bättre spegla elevers kunskaper [Government bill : Subject grades – grades are to better reflect student knowledge]. Riksrevisionen (2022) Statens insatser för likvärdig betygssättning– skillnaden mellan betyg och resultat på nationella prov [State Measures for Equivalent Grading – the difference between grades and results on National Tests]. Report, The Swedish National Audit Office. Skolverket (2022) Betyg och prövning : Kommentarer till Skolverkets allmänna råd om betyg och prövning [Grades and Examinations : Comments to General Advice on Grades and Examinations by The Swedish National Agency for Education]. Report, The Swedish National Agency for Education. Ullman A (1997) Rektorn : En studie av titeln och dess bärare [The Rector—A Study of a Title and its Holders]. PhD Thesis, Stockholm Institute of Education, Sweden. Wermke W, Jarl M, Prøitz TS and Nordholm D (2022) Comparing principal autonomy in time and space: modelling school leaders’ decision making and control. Journal of Curriculum Studies 54(6): 733-750.
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