Researching and evaluating secondary school leadership in New Zealand: The Educational Leadership Practices Survey

This research study investigates the use made of the Educational Leadership Practices Survey (ELP) by a sample of New Zealand secondary schools. The paper presents an overview of selected literature on leadership for learning and distributed leadership principles. The study’s methodology and contexts of three case study schools are then outlined, together with findings that reveal variable use of the ELP by school leaders in accordance with each school’s priority development needs. The discussion raises implications for leadership practice in regard to student input into decision making; teachers’ pastoral/ academic roles; interpretive support for the ELP; and professional learning for the range of school leaders. Data derived from the base-line questionnaire involved uni-variate quantitative analysis along with qualitative analysis of open-ended responses. For Likert-scale related questions, a six-point scale was used with zero corresponding to “disagree” at the left-hand end of the scale and five corresponding to “agree’ at the right-hand end. Open coding and subsequent thematic analysis informed the qualitative analysis of individual and focus group interviews. The combination of findings from the base-line questionnaire with findings from each case study provided opportunity for methodological triangulation to inform emerging themes. Generalisation from this study cannot be made to the wider population of all New Zealand secondary schools. However, the case study findings do offer a unique perspective into the leadership and learning context of the respective schools.