Description
Professional leadership training programmes aim at improving leadership skills of existing and aspiring school leaders and play a pivotal role in improving school quality. Since 2014, with support of VVOB – education for development, the Ministry of Education of Rwanda has developed and delivered a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Programme on Effective School Leadership (ESL) for head teachers (HT) and deputy head teachers (DHT) in the primary and general secondary schools in the country. This programme’s theory of change assumes that CPD of school leaders leads to improved professional development of teachers and a learning culture in schools, that eventually leads to improved learning outcomes for students. Approaching the end of the current implementation and learning cycle in 2021, all involved partners together with Maastricht University intend to answer one question: What is the impact of the CPD Programme on Effective School Leadership on students’ academic performance in the schools where school leaders participated.This study applies a quasi-experimental research design using difference-in-differences. Schools with a HT or DHT that have completed the CPD Programme on ESL (intervention group) in the cohort of 2015/16 or 2018/19, are compared with schools where nor the HT nor the DHT has been trained in those years, also not by other Development Partners. We compare schools in the year of the treatment with the year immediately after the treatment, and the interaction between year and treatment. The study matches participation data of HTs and DHTs for the CPD Programme with student performance and school-level data. It looks at student examination grades in English, Kinyarwanda, and Mathematics, and passing rates, in the final year of primary education (P6) and halfway secondary education (S3). The regression analyses include several control variables at the school and (D)HT level, such as the number of years of experience of the (D)HT and school category (government-aided, public, private).
The analyses are performed on a total of around 2518 observations for the P6 analyses and around 1399 observations for the S3 analyses. The preliminary results show a positive and significant effect for English for students in treated schools in the year immediately after the intervention, both for P6 and for S3. No overall effect was found for the other subjects. However, interaction analyses with school leader position show that both in P6 and S3 the results in English are driven by DHT being trained. For Math and Kinyarwanda we do find a positive effect for when the HT is trained, but not for DHT. For passing rates, no effects at all were found. We conclude that the intervention was partly effective, and that the effects are very consistent between P6 and S3, but that we need to further investigate the differences between effect in subject and between type of school leader position. The paper highlights the importance of CPD for school leaders and its impact at the level of student’s performance and as such aligns withthe conference theme on developing leadership practices and capabilities across systems and boundaries that emphasize equity, quality, and sustainability.
| Period | 11 Jan 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event title | ICSEI 2022 virtual conference |
| Event type | Conference |