Session Information
26 SES 03 B, School Leadership and Inclusive Education: Future Perspectives
Paper Session
Contribution
National school systems have been significantly affected by several global trends since the end of the 20th century. One has been the powerful movement towards an inclusive school for all, represented by the Declaration of Salamanca in 1994.
Various stakeholders of education systems have to interpret policies, which led to many variations of inclusive education not just internationally, but also in a national frame (Badstieber, 2021). Findings have shown that especially school principals play a significant role in the implementation of reforms in general (Moos et al., 2016) but it is just assumed that they are important actors in the context of inclusive schooling (Badstieber, 2021). Therefore, gaining knowledge on the making of inclusive schooling on the part of school principals in primary schools as joint learning of students in need of special support and students without this need (Magnússon, 2015) is the main interest of this research. The study asks: How is leadership autonomy regarding the implementation of inclusion policies described in policy documents in Germany and Norway since 1994?
The aspects of autonomy, accountability and more complex task allocations for school principals get more and more attention in research (Brauckmann, 2012; Andersson, 2020; Wermke et al., 2022). Inclusion and its implementation through reforms is one of these complex tasks. Therefore, the fact of inclusion and its implementation is especially significant for this analysis. Inclusion shall improve the well-being of partially excluded people; this is associated with many potential errors and risks on the part of school principals, a topic crucial for the aspect of leadership autonomy.
Leadership autonomy is thereby understood as decision-making, control, and associated responsibilities (Wermke et al., 2022). Considering that, a certain amount of autonomy in education is needed to quickly react to different educational needs: “Professionals in public education need a certain scope of action to formulate their decisions in interactions on the reactions of students in their educational day-to-day life. [However], to reduce the complexity of possible interactional and educational outcomes, professionals in education have to rely on an organization that helps them reduce the possible complexities in education” (Wermke et al., 2022, p. 5). Therefore, to unpack autonomy and the aspect of control (possibly enacted through an organization), this study draws furthermore on the three dimensions of autonomy and control from Cribb and Gewirtz (2007): loci and modes of autonomy, domains of autonomy-control, and loci and modes of control.
The year 1994 is chosen as starting point for the analysis, because 92 countries agreed on a school for all during an UNESCO-conference in Salamanca. This led to extensive changes not just in schools in general but also in leadership autonomy.
Germany and Norway are interesting to compare due to many similarities in later education reforms with significant impact on educational leadership. However, these reforms are embedded in different educational traditions. Both countries differ in their education system, a bureaucratized tracked in Germany and a comprehensive approach in Norway but resemble each other in their method of system regulation (Wermke & Prøitz, 2021). The educational system in both countries put high emphasis on learning outcomes and personal growth of pupils, where educational leadership plays a vital role for (Grissom et al., 2018).
Comparing Germany and Norway with an almost contrary approach to inclusive education leads to a more nuanced picture about leadership autonomy from a comparative perspective. Since the analysis is not just conducted over time but also during an acute crisis like the COVID-19-pandemic, it will reveal challenges principals are facing in their leadership autonomy on long- and short-term issues.
Method
Based on the specialty of 16 federal states in Germany and their very own regulations regarding education, four federal states are consulted for this study. The decision for these states is based on a representative presentation of both rural and urban environment and a previous research project. Because of the complex multi-tracked school system in Germany and to obtain better results in the comparability, this project just focuses on primary education. Both governing documents on state level, school laws and their guiding documents regarding inclusive education are investigated. The first group consists of visionary policy texts which present an overview over changes in mindset and terminology of concepts (Bowen, 2009; Prøitz, 2015); inclusive schooling and leadership in this case. In addition to that, legislative texts are used as material, presenting legally fixed rights and duties. Here, school leaders’ task allocations and the conceptualization of leadership is specified. School leaders in both countries are obliged to follow the law and justify their decisions based on the Education Act (Møller & Skedsmo, 2013). Since not all tasks are unequivocal regulated and formulated in policy documents (Møller & Skedsmo, 2013; Stenersen & Prøitz, 2022), guidance documents are further included in the analysis. This support material makes school laws more practical oriented (Hopmann, 1999) and depicts rules of procedure and principles focused on inclusion in the school setting. With the help of qualitative content document analysis (Bowen, 2009) in the further development of Prøitz (2015), elements from both content analysis and thematic analysis are combined. To filter out the documents actually writing about inclusion and school leadership, word counts (inklu*, integr*, leit*, rektor* for Germany; inklu*, tilpass*, led*, rektor* for Norway) were conducted. Since this research project is focusing on inclusive schooling in primary education, documents concentrating on other types of education were excluded. All the documents mentioning school principals and inclusion in double figures (32 at the end) are included in this study. Initially, the analytical coding started with a set of predefined codes based on job allocations from a foregone study (Brauckmann & Schwarz, 2012), while more elaborated codes were developed inductively during the process. At the end, the coded paragraphs were analyzed with the help of the three dimensions from Cribb and Gewirtz (2007) and categorized in a leadership-control-matrix (Wermke et al., 2022). With the help of this matrix, results can be presented in a clear and comparable manner.
Expected Outcomes
Preliminary results are showing that the documents from both countries are quite similar in the early years of the time frame of the analysis (1994 until 2000) but differ in their description of task allocations later on. During the 1990s, German documents are referring to task allocations a school in general has to fulfill. It is not mentioned who exactly in the school is responsible for what. The same can be found in Norwegian documents, where task allocations are mostly written in passive forms. Interesting here, after the surprising results from the first international student assessment (PISA) in 2001, task allocations get more significant in German and Norwegian policy documents. Both countries are also emphasizing the importance of collaboration of different stakeholders in the education system. Educational authorities, like the school board in Germany and the municipality as school owner in Norway also play a vital role. Their scope of action is officially listed in an accurate manner in the German documents. Norwegian documents also define tasks from school owners but mention the devolution of authority to the school leader at the same time. It is furthermore assumed that school owners indeed delegate their tasks. One significant difference are the aspect of control and consequences. Even though German leaders have to give account of some of their tasks to the school board, they are not facing any consequences. Advice and closer collaboration are rather expected. Whereas in Norway, regarding to the law, torts come along with penalties. On account of this analysis, the study reveals what policies in various times and contexts implies for school principals in the implementation of inclusive schools. It presents important differences between two countries and will therefore demonstrate context-specific particularities. This helps to make various patterns of autonomy visible and will lead to further research.
References
Andersson, A. (2020). En komparativ studie om upplevd autonomi hos rektorer i Norge och Sverige [Master’s thesis]. Uppsala university. Badstieber, B. (2021). Inklusion als Transformation?! Eine empirische Analyse der Rekontextualisierungsstrategien von Schulleitenden im Kontext schulischer Inklusion. Julius Klinkhardt. Bowen, G. A. (2009). Document Analysis as a Qualitative Research Method. Qualitative research journal, 9(2), pp. 27-40. https://doi.org/10.3316/QRJ0902027 Brauckmann, S. (2012). Schulleitungshandeln zwischen deconcentration, devolution und delegation (3D) – empirische Annäherungen aus internationaler Perspektive. Empirische Pädagogik. 26(1), pp. 78-102. https://doi.org/10.25656/01:5872 Brauckmann, S. & Schwarz, A. (2012). No time to manage? The trade-off between relevant tasks and actual priorities of school leaders in Germany. International journal of educational management. 29(6), pp. 749-765. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-10-2014-0138 Cribb, A. & Gewirtz, S. (2007). Unpacking autonomy and control in education: Some conceptual and normative groundwork for a comparative analysis. European educational research journal, 6(3), pp. 203-213. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2007.6.3.203 Grissom, J. A., Blissett, R. S. L. & Mitani, H. (2018). Evaluating School Principals: Supervisor Ratings of Principal Practice and Principal Job Performance. Educational evaluation and policy analysis, 40(3), pp. 446-472. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373718783883 Hopmann, S. (1999). The Curriculum as a Standard of Public Education. Studies in philosophy and education, 18(1-2), pp. 89-106. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005139405296 Magnússon, G. (2015). Traditions and Challenges. Special Support in Swedish independent compulsory schools. [Doctoral dissertation]. Mälardalen University Sweden. Moos, L., Nihlfors, E. & Paulsen, J. M. (2016). Nordic Superintendents: Agents in a Broken Chain. Springer International Publishing. Møller, J. & Skedsmo, G. (2013). Modernising Education: New Public Management reform in the Norwegian education system. Journal of educational administration and history, 45(4), pp. 336-353. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2013.822353 Prøitz, T. S. (2015). Learning Outcomes as a Key Concept in Policy Documents throughout Policy Changes. Scandinavian journal of educational research, 59(3), pp. 275-296. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2014.904418 Stenersen, C. & Prøitz, T. S. (2022). Just a Buzzword? The use of Concepts and Ideas in Educational Governance. Scandinavian journal of educational research, 66(2), pp. 193-207. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2020.1788153 Wermke, W., Jarl, M., Prøitz, T. S. & Nordholm, D. (2022). Comparing principal autonomy in time and space: modelling school leaders' decision making and control. Journal of curriculum studies, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2022.2127124 Wermke, W. & Prøitz, T. S. (2021). Integration, fragmentation and complexity - governing of the teaching profession and the Nordic model. In J. E. Larsen, B. Schulte & F. W. Thue (Eds.), Schoolteachers and the Nordic Model: Comparative and Historical Perspectives. Routledge.
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