Abstract

QUINTAS, Helena  and  GONCALVES, José Alberto Mendonça. The leadership of schools in three portuguese regions: A view from external evaluation. Rev. Port. de Educação [online]. 2012, vol.25, n.2, pp.89-116. ISSN 0871-9187.

School leadership has significant effects on the learning, development and academic success of the pupils and on the quality of educational organisations; so, to a large extent, the effectiveness of the school depends upon the way in which leadership is carried out. It is on this basis that we undertook our study which this article reports. We aim at characterising the leadership of schools and school clusters in three Portuguese regions (Algarve, Alentejo and Lisbon and Tagus Valley), based on the analysis of the content of external evaluation reports produced by teams from the General Inspectorate of Education during the 2006/2007, 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 academic years . The goals of the study were to understand how the educational organisations put into practice their vision of school and how they implement the sharing and circulation of information seeking to achieve the established goals and purposes, thereby giving form to the hierarchical ladder for the exercising of power. By analysing the data we have been able to establish a “profile” of the leaderships in the schools and school clusters that were evaluated, although we consider that their results cannot be extrapolated, given the limits in the wording of the external evaluation reports and the fact that these reports were produced by different teams from region to region and even within the regions themselves.

Keywords : External evaluation of schools; External evaluation reports; Leadership; Exercising leadership in schools.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )