Leadership practices and inclusive education reform in primary schools in Bangladesh

This study was undertaken to investigate leadership practices for Inclusive Education (IE) reform in primary schools in Bangladesh. Specifically, the study investigated leadership practice structures, views of school leaders about the accountability approach in primary schools, school leaders’ opinions on challenges to implementing IE and possible strategies to address the identified challenges. The study also explored the relationships between school variables, teachers’ demographic variables and the perceptions of teachers with regard to distributed leadership practices for IE reform. The school variables included: school location, school size, performance of school and school type. Teachers’ demographic variables included: gender, age, teaching experience, educational qualifications of teachers, professional education and professional education in regard to IE. In addition, this study examined the relationship between perceptions of teachers about distributed leadership practices for IE and their satisfaction about the implementation of IE and the work environment in the school. This study was conducted in three phases and employed a mixed method design. Phase-I and III were quantitative in nature and Phase-II was qualitative. In Phase-I, the Social Network Survey (SNS) was used to investigate leadership structures from a distributed perspective. All teachers (n=79) from ten primary schools were invited to participate in Phase-I. The analysis process applied simple descriptive statistics in this phase to identify leaders in each school. The leaders identified by SNS were interviewed in Phase-II. A semi-structured interview protocol was employed to collect data. The participants (n=21) in this phase were head teachers, teachers and key members of the school community (e.g. members of School Management Committee, local education officials) nominated by the teachers of the ten schools in Phase-I. An inductive thematic analysis approach was employed to analyse the interview data. Themes arising from the qualitative analysis in Phase-II contributed to the development of a scale, entitled the Distributed Leadership Practice for Inclusive Education (DLPIE). The DLPIE scale was administered to 673 participants (e.g., teachers and head teachers) from 308 schools in Phase-III. A two-stage cluster sampling method was applied to select the participants. Findings indicated that distributed practices were prevalent in all of the schools involved in the study. Individuals who did not hold formal leadership positions in schools inspired and influenced the practices of their colleagues. This study also revealed that there was a significant, positive correlation between teachers’ perceptions about distributed leadership practices for IE and their satisfaction about implementation of IE and the work environment in schools. This study further identified that the primary education system in Bangladesh employed a managerial accountability approach that provided limited authority to the members of school communities: in particular, this approach prevented parents and students from being involved in leadership activities in schools. This study also identified a number of challenges to implementing IE reform including: the negative attitudes of members of school community towards IE; the limited authority of school leaders; a lack of accessible infrastructure; a lack of adequate resources (e.g., assistive devices for students with special needs, learning-teaching materials); and, a lack of professional development opportunities for school educators. The research has implications for how schools could be better organised to support IE in Bangladesh. One suggestion to support the development of IE might be to expand distributed leadership practices and empower members of the wider school community (e.g., students, parents and others) to ensure their active participation in finding creative solutions to the challenges their school faces in implementing IE.