Ua Aoina le Manogi o le Lolo: Pasifika Schooling Improvement Research - Final Report

4. Leadership Patterns

The leadership survey was completed by 69 teachers. These came from five schools in Cluster A, five schools in Cluster B and three Case Study schools from outside these clusters. (There was a total of five Case Study Schools that returned the surveys: one within Cluster A, one within Cluster B and three outside these clusters). Demographics for teachers who completed the leadership survey across all schools are presented in Table 62 .

Teachers rated aspects of leadership on a scale of 1 (never) to 5 (always). Each of the six sections represented a different aspect of leadership, as described in Table 63.

Mean scores for each section and across all sections for all teachers are presented in Table 64 . Means are comprised of all teachers who completed every question in that section.

Mean ratings were moderate to high in each section, falling between 3 (sometimes) and 4 (most of the time), or 4 (most of the time) and 5 (always). The highest mean rating was in two sections: Section 5 – positive school climate, and Section 6 – positive home-school relations. The lowest mean rating was in Section 2 – strong emphasis on academics, while Section 1 – strong instructional leadership of the principal / school leaders was only slightly higher. However, the variation in responses (as indicated by the standard deviation) was greatest in Section 1, indicating that some teachers rated these measures low while others high. This could be explained by the fact that both teachers and principals answered the survey. School management may self-rate themselves differently to teachers.

Variations existed between clusters and individual schools, as seen in Table 65 and Table 66. Mean scores for each section varied from 3.25 (Section 1, Case Study 4) to 5.00 (Section 5, Case Study 3). Given that a score of 3 is ‘sometimes’ and a score of 5 is ‘always’, these ratings were quite high in most cases despite the variation. Most mean scores fell between 4 (most of the time) and 5 (always).

Cluster A had higher mean ratings overall (M = 4.24) and Cluster B had lower ratings (M = 4.02). Both Cluster A and B had their highest ratings in Section 6 (positive home-school relations). Cluster A’s lowest mean scores were in Section 2 (strong emphasis on academics), and Cluster B’s lowest mean scores were in Section 1 (strong instructional leadership of the Principal/school leaders) and Section 2 (strong emphasis on academics).

Mean ratings across all five Case Study Schools were similar to Cluster A (M = 4.20). Nearly all the Case Study Schools had their highest ratings in Section 5 (positive school climate). There was some variation between mean scores of the five Case Study Schools. One school (Case Study 4) had mean scores between 3 (sometimes) and 4 (most of the time), while the others had most or all mean scores between 4 (most of the time) and 5 (always). There was also much variation between the section with the highest and lowest mean score for each school. For example, Section 1 received the equal highest score for Case Study School 3, but the lowest score for Case Study School 4. This variation may be due to the fact that each school had only a small number of teacher participants (number of participants ranged between 3 and 9).