WORKING TIME PLANNING OF HEADS OF PRE-SCHOOL EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Abstract

Activity areas of the head of the educational institution include school administration and management, purposeful use of human and material resources to ensure the quality of education. The school context influences the heads’ working day and their time distribution; therefore, it is relevant to conduct research to evaluate the contextual factors determining the opportunities and limitations of heads’ working time planning. The aim of the research is to investigate the distribution of working time of pre-school institutions’ heads for performance of different functions and to reveal the opportunities and limitations of working time planning. The study was conducted in 2018-2019. During the first stage of the study, one head of the pre-school institution from each of three European countries (Lithuania, France, Italy) was surveyed. The results of the survey have shown certain similarities in heads’ activities due to the specificity of the head’s work, starting with the formation of strategic aims, parents’ and social partners’ involvement in the institution’s activities and finishing with the assessment of the quality of the institution’s activity. Given that heads of different countries work in quite different contexts and under different working conditions, it is not appropriate to draw summarising conclusions, but the obtained data can be used in developing the methodology of analogous research. During the second stage, the topics of planning the working time of the heads of pre-school educational institutions were analysed. The heads of Siauliai pre-school educational institutions, involved in the study, have revealed that they spend most of their time working with the documents of the institution, solving personnel and financial issues. In other words, the activity prevailing in the work of the heads of Lithuanian pre-school institutions is administrative-bureaucratic processes, while the heads themselves are inclined to use part of that time for supervision and improvement of the educational process and for their own professional development. Although one of the head’s functions is proper and timely planning of activities, and thus, of their own working time, in practice obstacles to time planning, related to management of human and material resources and multi-tasking, when several activities differing in content and scope are performed simultaneously, are encountered. Keywords: working time planning, pre-school educational institution, head of the pre-school educational institution, distributed leadership.