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The purpose of this paper is to seek insights into the demands and challenges faced by school principals in Spain, especially in their dealings with local education authorities.

In all, 100 principals from public infant, primary and secondary schools in Alicante (Spain) participated in the study, which was carried out from a qualitative research perspective using deductive content analysis.

Most participants noted the need to improve channels of communication with, and support from, the local education authority. They also stressed the desirability of increasing their autonomy, reducing bureaucratic tasks and improving working conditions, which is in line with the international framework. Their narratives make it clear that they remain tied to a management leadership model but actually aspire to an instructive leadership.

An absence of triangulation and the use of a single data collection technique are the limitations of this paper.

These participants are practising professionals who are proposing ways to improve aspects of their working lives based on actual experience. Acknowledging their voices could inspire the design of policies aimed at improving the principal’s role in Spain.

Knowledge is contributed to the area of study into proposals for improving the role of the principal, but with new and contextualised insights.

Despite the focal position of school principals in Australian education, there exist hardly any data on the work that they actually do. This study reports on continuous observations — for three weeks each — of the principals of a State High School, an Independent College and a Catholic College in Melbourne. The variables of their work during the school day were recorded by the researcher, who attempted non‐participant observation, and the principals kept a diary of their “after‐hours” work. The content and characteristics of their work are described with the Findings expressed in a set of propositions about the principalship.

The process of training and preparing principals is driven by a characteristics model. Underlying each of the components in the characteristics model is decision making. Decision making defines the work of principals. Those who prepare principals can improve the leadership quality of principals and thereby impact school effectiveness by focusing on decision making. Decision‐making assessment is a critical component to principal preparation and ongoing development. It can be used to assess the quality of decisions made by prospective and acting school administrations. Through decision‐making assessment principals can become aware of their cognitive decision‐making patterns thus allowing them opportunity to replace potentially dysfunctional patterns with patterns that are more effective and efficient.

School development planning (SDP) is one outcome of education being managed by modes of management that originate in the corporate world of private enterprise. While the rhetoric indicates strongly that modes of management such as SDP are supportive of efficiency, effectiveness and public accountability, empirical evidence is slight. Provides a case study of SDP in a small rural disadvantaged primary school called Meiki in which SDP has proved to be a rewarding process for staff and has had a positive impact on student outcomes. However, it raises serious questions about the connection between SDP and claims for enhanced efficiency.

The purpose of this study is to explore the mediating role of workplace attitudes: professional identity and career aspirations between perceptions of principals’ authentic leadership and teacher behaviors: intent to leave, organizational citizenship behavior, counterproductive work behavior, lateness and intention to leave among teachers.

The sample was composed of 605 teachers, randomly selected, nested in 41 Israeli elementary, junior high and high schools. Data analysis was based on multi-level structural equations.

The findings indicated that the more the school was perceived by the teachers as having an authentic leader, the professional identity of the teachers was higher and was negatively associated with counterproductive work behavior toward colleagues in the school, while the teachers’ career aspirations were higher and negatively associated with counterproductive work behavior toward the organization.

This study shows the importance of teachers’ individual and collective perceptions and their impacts on teacher behaviors. The practical contribution may include encouraging principals to promote high standards of authentic leadership, to raise teachers’ professional identity and their career aspirations and reduce teachers’ counterproductive work behavior and intention to leave.

Taking into consideration the scope and pace of change in education at the start of the 1990s, it is not at all surprising that many researchers asked questions about the changes in the role of principals. Groups these changes in the principalship under two broad categories: changes in internal operations (internal leadership) and alterations in relationships with the larger school environment (environmental leadership). One common theme underlying both types of leadership is the expectation that principals justify permanently the general and specific decisions they make. Considers this justification to be one of the main requirements for creative leadership. Data from four different studies in primary schools in the Dutch‐speaking part of Belgium are used to illustrate how principals organize and structure this justification task. The data illustrate clearly that teachers are confronted with different justification styles and that principals do differ a great deal as far as creative management is concerned.

This study centers the reflections of principals across the USA as they navigated the overwhelming stress of closing and reopening schools during a global pandemic. Specifically, the authors explored how school principals addressed self-care and their own well-being during the pandemic.

This research study is part of a broader qualitative study conducted by 20 scholars from across the USA in Spring 2020 and organized by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). This national research team conducted 120 qualitative interviews with public school principals in 19 different states and 100 districts. As part of this team, the authors coded and analyzed all 120 transcripts in NVivo using a self-care framework.

The responses from the participants capture some of the complexity of self-care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors found evidence of both negative and positive sentiments towards self-care that will be described in five major themes. For the tensions with self-care, the authors developed two primary themes: leaders eat last and keep from falling off the cliff. For the demonstrations of self-care, the authors also developed three primary themes: release the endorphins, people need people and unplug from work.

Although researchers have identified the stressors and reactions of principals during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known on how principals engaged in self-care practices. This study aims to identify these self-care practices and offer recommendations for principals.

The purpose of this paper was to conduct a critical analysis of the origins and implementation of problem‐based learning in educational administration as a window into the limitations of this approach and more generally administrator preparation.

The author reviewed the published work of the originator from 1970‐2009, as well as his preparation program for principals, and evaluated his approach primarily in light of two perspectives, emotional labor and positive emotions. The paper probes the utility of using these sociological and psychological perspectives in studying and understanding the emotional side of administration through interviews with principals.

The major finding of this analysis was to question whether sufficient attention is being paid to the emotional aspects of administration in problem‐based learning in particular and administrator preparation programs more generally. The analysis reveals several areas where more attention should be paid, and provides some insight into the nature of mental and emotional labor of principals.

The paper combines two theoretical approaches in a novel way to raise a series of questions that can be used to evaluate programs for preparing administrators in terms of a critical, but for the most part neglected, area – the emotional side of administration. For those who choose to incorporate this facet of administration into their preparation program, the author describes an approach that might be used.

Deals with one aspect of cultural leadership – leadership attributes. Based on recent research on cultural aspects in educational leadership in Singapore, attempts to identify essential attributes possessed by school principals that are found to be an indispensible yardstick for measuring leadership effectiveness. The leader, e.g. a school principal, has the responsibility to design and maintain a school culture as a framework with its unique environment and atmosphere in which teachers and administrators work. Attempts to search for some answers to: what are the personal characteristics that one possesses to be a school leader?; what leadership attributes are essential for leadership effectiveness?; how do these characteristics and attributes help a leader build up the strengths of the school culture? Presents the results of interviews and discussions with around 200 heads of departments of schools in Singapore.

The Howard Shuttering Contractors case throws considerable light on the importance which the tribunals attach to warnings before dismissing an employee. In this case the tribunal took great pains to interpret the intention of the parties to the different site agreements, and it came to the conclusion that the agreed procedure was not followed. One other matter, which must be particularly noted by employers, is that where a final warning is required, this final warning must be “a warning”, and not the actual dismissal. So that where, for example, three warnings are to be given, the third must be a “warning”. It is after the employee has misconducted himself thereafter that the employer may dismiss.