The Courage to Stand Up: A Qualitative Research Into the Perspective of a Potential Primary School Leader

Abstract

The educational field in Europe deals with staff shortages. Recently, the attention to school leader shortages increased in the Netherlands specifically. However, the empirical research on school leader shortage across Europe is still scarce. Because school leaders often have an origin in teaching, we need to understand what drives or demotivates a teacher nowadays to become a school leader in the first place. The goal of this study was to get more insight into the perception of Dutch primary school teachers on their current job and on a school leader’s function. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted among teachers, focusing on motivation from job satisfaction and self-efficacy. Results show that teachers altogether were motivated for their current job yet were demotivated by the additional tasks the teaching job includes. The reasons for possibly taking a school leader’s job entailed taking a personal challenge and stating clear goals for a school. Teachers all gave a confident impression when asked about their self-efficacy, nonetheless, teachers expected to need more work experience in order to perform a school leader’s function. This could Most participants were relatively young and future research could discuss motivational factors with older teachers. Also, a connection between motivation for becoming a school leader and current job satisfaction arose from the data. This invites for further investigation.