In a time of uncertainty, managing and leading educational systems
The world is rapidly changing. We are reminded daily, even hourly, that we have entered a new era of geopolitical, economic, demographic and technological disruption. For decades, policy makers have assumed that economic globalization would yield democratic progress and more equitable opportunities – and assumed that improvements in educational outcomes inevitably would help countries leapfrog towards sustainable development. Today, this picture is more clouded.
As the COVID-19 pandemic taught us, leadership in education inevitably becomes both more difficult and more critical in times of acute change. Yet, as we show in our background paper for the 2024/5 GEM Report, it’s time to give more attention to understanding and improving system level leadership and management.
How does system leadership work? Leadership can be defined as the exercise of influence on organizational members and other stakeholders toward the identification and achievement of the organization’s vision and goals. At the system level, such leadership can be seen as the ability of education officials to drive large-scale improvement across different levels of the education system – schools, districts, regions and whole countries. Management, in contrast, refers to processes and procedures that keep the organization running smoothly and is generally more administrative in nature. And while management is an important part of every leader’s work, system leadership captures those efforts to derive greater impact and to adapt to new circumstances.
In our background paper, we show that there are two major paradigms for thinking about how to drive improvements in educational systems. One is more mechanistic and rarely speaks to the problem of leadership and leadership capacity, especially below the national level. The second focuses on how organizational learning can be improved through collaboration, professional development, and ensuring that policies and practices are aligned to improve learning outcomes.
Two paradigms, changing prescriptions
Principal-agent models predominate in prescriptions for improving educational systems. Such models focus on how to control human behaviour: principals in an organization set goals and strategies, and agents tasked with their implementation are expected to comply. Approaches and interventions drawing on this paradigm prioritize formal planning, the use of data, the introduction of performance incentives and sanctions, and in certain cases, the creation of greater competition among delivering agents. In this paradigm, subnational education officials are simply intermediaries under the control of the national level. At best, they are expected to manage the schools and bureaucratic routines under their responsibility. Leadership – except at the very apex of the system – is rarely seen as an important feature of system reform.
Principal-agent approaches are often proposed to tackle some of the historical legacies of post-colonial states, where centralized decision making, and risk-averse subnational entities with limited autonomy, are more the norm than the exception. They have built on decades of elaborate public sector decentralization reforms. Yet recent research suggests they have had limited impact in improving bureaucratic authority, capacity and resourcing at subnational levels. One recent study characterizes the current state of affairs as “post-office bureaucracy” – a go-between with little discretion or capacity for responding to challenge. Another example demonstrates how efforts to alter governance structures have resulted in serious confusion regarding who is in charge of what in educational systems. Research also suggests that performance management systems have produced limited improvement in performance. Furthermore, when used primarily for top-down accountability in education systems, expanded monitoring and data systems often misfire.
On the other hand, the learning organization paradigm emphasizes leadership at multiple levels, encouraging professional discretion and trust-building, and an enlarged role for continuous learning and improvement within educational bureaucracies, which can lead to more sustainable reforms. Unlike the principal-agent paradigm, this approach has long situated instructional leadership, not just management of resources and people, as a core purpose of educational bureaucracies at every level. It focuses on improving the leadership capacity of educational administrators at every level in at least four areas: setting shared goals; focusing on learning, fostering collaboration, and developing people.
This paradigm has been used to foster successful system reform in many OECD countries. Recent case studies also indicate that it applies to low- and middle-income countries. In Yamini Aiyar’s monograph on successful school reform in Delhi, it is shared vision, distributed leadership, local ownership and iterative problem solving that does the heavy lifting. Akshay Mangla’s research of three Indian states shows that middle-tier leaders who emphasized stakeholder deliberation, problem-solving and flexibility in procedures were able to sustain improvements in primary earning outcomes. Moreover, Levy and colleagues’ work in South Africa shows how district-level leadership capacity itself can compensate and substitute for profound system failures at the regional or national levels. Overall, the research suggests that greater district-level autonomy, along with organizational learning and problem-solving practices, can strengthen the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to rapid changes across widely different operational contexts.
How paradigms shape policy
We present Ghana, Rwanda, and Brazil as case studies in our background paper. We illustrate how these paradigms have manifested in different contexts, shaping the effectiveness of leadership interventions.
In Ghana, the introduction of annual performance contracts helped establish greater accountability and performance at the national level, as leaders emphasized problem-solving and learning sessions on shared challenges among central agencies. However, in the rollout of contracts to regions, districts and schools, leadership development and capacity building was neglected, leading to limited progress on key goals.
Performance contracts were also introduced in Rwanda’s education system to improve performance on policy priorities. However, the country’s sub-national education governance is shared across two ministries: Education and Local Development. This sharing complicates priority-setting and lines of accountability. Consequently, contracts tended to prioritize infrastructure and accessibility over instructional quality. The governance structure limited the effectiveness of performance contracts in aligning leadership efforts with long-term educational improvements.
In contrast, in Brazil, particularly in the city of Sobral and its state of Ceará, a carefully balanced combination of centralized oversight, capacity development, and local autonomy seems to have contributed to sustained improvements in literacy and overall learning outcomes.
enhancing leadership capabilities We also show that current methods of establishing system leadership that are funded by international donors frequently fail. Too often, internationally funded reforms rely on fly-in technical expertise, or on short-term, project-specific training. Donors pay a great deal of attention to mapping and planning of reforms but often have no approach to sustaining ecosystems for capacity development. They fund data systems, and are increasingly interested in hard evidence on learning, and on the use of dashboards and scorecards to hold agents accountable. But development partners have not yet tackled the challenge of aligning leadership mandates at different levels of the educational system around instructional improvement. They have largely neglected the need for expanded capacity at subnational levels where local problem identification and bottom-up problem solving are essential for system reform.
In low- and middle-income countries, much of what is known about how to improve educational systems still focuses on getting policies, plans, and technical systems and procedures right. This ignores the potential impact of strengthening leadership capacity. This is in contrast to three decades of research on school and system improvement in OECD nations, which describes broad roles for leaders and leadership at every level to improve system-wide reform implementation. In these times of rapid change and uncertainty, the education system is best served by leaders at all levels of the system who can effectively learn together and adapt to different operational contexts and evolving circumstances.
