The concepts of enhanced school autonomy, evaluation and accountability, which have been introduced in the 1990s already, have lead to new approaches to school governance (van Amelsvoort & Scheerens, 1997). In recent years, measures of school governance have been more precisely defined, tending towards the enhancement of the ability and the quality by which schools meet educational objectives (Pont et al., 2008). Current amendments in school legislation in Europe aim to improve quality by strengthening the autonomy of individual schools, accompanied by development processes initiated and governed by the schools themselves and linked to an external setting of standards and an increased control of outcomes. In this context, the role of the school management as a central agent in implementing these concepts comes into focus of empirical educational research (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2005). Special interest is placed on strategic management in terms of mid-term and long-term school development. But school leaders do not operate in a vacuum and therefore contextual factors have to be accounted for. School principals’ actions greatly depend on the perceptions of the particular context in which they work, since that is how they interpret the external environment and legal framework which are related to their practices.
Although policy makers strengthen and underline the necessity of “deregulation”, discussions about deregulation versus regulation in Europe still seem to be characterized by a lack of sophistication and complexity and require a more differentiated picture of the degree and the forms of deregulation. Fostering deregulation, for example, may result in a process which ends up at the opposite, in more hierarchical structures and enhanced top-down control. Furthermore, facing the reality of policy making, pure transfer of either top down polices or bottom up models has proven to be obsolete; these strategies are more and more replaced by a governance mix of regulation and deregulation patterns. As a consequence, the analysis of new educational governance approaches should consider the local actor´s interpretation of new roles and new responsibilities. Relating actions and reactions of school leaders to the legal and formal environment they are working in should lead to more contextual and realistic patterns of responsiveness.
Against this background, the paper aims to investigate - on the individual level of school leaders - whether school autonomy needs deregulation, or a regulation towards autonomy respectively. The school system of Cyprus represents a very good example for such an investigation as personnel and administrative management, curriculum issues and allocation of resources are mostly exercised by the Ministry without any significant deviation (Drake, Pair, Ross, Postlethwaite & Ziogas, 1997). More recently, the necessity of a more devolved educational system has been identified the Ministry of Education, which has publicized a policy document promulgating its intentions for strategic planning in education (Cyprus Ministry of Education and culture, 2007). Among other objectives, this includes “the granting of administrative and educational autonomy to the school units in such a way as to promote the better use of human resources in education.”

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