Preliminary Findings of Correlations between School Leaders’ Strategic Leadership Practice, Quality Assurance System Practice and Risky and Non-Risky Malaysian Schools

Abstract

This paper is investigating the correlations between school leaders’ strategic leadership practice (SL), quality assurance system practice (QA), and risky and non-risky schools (RNS) in Malaysia by employing a quantitative survey approach. The purpose was to examine the educational leaders’ perceptions on SL, QA, and RNS in Malaysia as well as to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference among these variables. The data were collected from 77 educational leaders from selected 20 Malaysian national secondary schools in Kuala Lumpur (Federal Territory) and Selangor. The research instrument was a set of five-rating scale questionnaire. For the data interpretation, nonparametric correlations, specifically Spearman’s correlation, t-test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were performed to test the hypotheses. The results showed a significant correlation between school leaders’ SL and QA (p = .000). However, the correlations of both variables with RNS Malaysian schools were insignificant statistically. The results of t-test that compared the dependent variables (SL, QA, and RNS) with the independent variable (gender) proved no statistically significant difference in SL, QA, and RNS between male and female educational leaders. Finally, the results of the ANOVA and post hoc analyses disclosed statistically significant difference between groups exist, for both professional qualifications as well as current position as an educational leader with SL and QA, but results were insignificant with RNS. This study provides evidence of the positive relationship between school leaders’ strategic leadership practice and quality assurance system practice. Such knowledge may shed some light on the school leaders about the factors that may potentially reduce the risky cases in Malaysian schools. This preliminary finding is considered as one of the dearth studies related to factors affecting the risky and non-risky schools in Malaysia.