The School of Education and Rinnelle Lee Piggott, doctoral student, present the seminar ‘New principal leadership and school culture’.

Blurb: The literature on new principals tends to focus on the challenges of incumbents. However, there is little detailed evidence of the nature of their attempts at reshaping or enhancing school culture, which may be their greatest single professional challenge. A significant number of primary schools in Trinidad and Tobago are currently headed by new principals and concerns have been publicly raised at the national level about these new principals’ fit to schools.

This seminar presents a study that was designed to investigate the nature of the interactions between new principals’ leadership and their inherited school cultures in primary schools of different effectiveness states – high, average and low achievement – which face challenging circumstances. It also investigated the impact of these interactions on school processes, new principals’ emotions and professional development and student academic outcomes. The study adopted an explanatory, multiple-case study approach that conceptualizes principal leadership as relational, recognizing that whilst a new principal may wish to re-culture and restructure a school, the existing school’s culture and the new principal’s own professional judgment may combine to influence his/her ability to do so. The main research method used for engaging with this work was a critical incident technique.

Findings suggest that the new principals experienced two phases of leadership transition before their second year in post:

• inheritance and encounter
• building and shaping

For more information, visit the School of Education website. To attend, email educationresearchstaff@nottingham.ac.uk