Leadership in Flemish secondary education: mapping principals’ daily assignments, self-efficacy beliefs and leadership practices

Schools all around the world operate in an increasingly complex and demanding environment. Over the past decades, school leadership therefore attracted a lot of attention. Leadership for Learning (LFL) emerged most recently as a comprehensive leadership framework, integrating aspects of frameworks thus far applied in school leadership research. Via semi-structured interviews and surveys, this paper sought to deepen our understanding of the leadership practices and beliefs among Flemish school leaders in secondary schools and assess the prevalence of an LFL model in Flanders. It appears principals’ daily routines are mainly operational in nature. Due to tight work schedules and day-to-day hustles, little time remains to work on a school’s vision and pedagogical strategy. Furthermore, school leader’s descriptions of leadership most closely connects to a transformational leadership mode with principals’ self-efficacy beliefs explaining most of its variance.status: publishe