Needs, problems and competencies of school principals in Serbia

Educational leadership has an impact on school climate, teachers? practices and student outcomes. Having in mind its importance, in this paper we wanted to examine the barriers that school principals in Serbia face in their everyday work, solutions that they propose, leadership tasks that they deem important, as well as those competencies which they feel they need to improve. To those ends we conducted a mixed-method study in which 107 principals, teachers, school counsellors, and representatives of school authorities participated in focus groups and interviews, and 200 elementary and high school principals responded to a questionnaire about leadership. Our findings indicate a myriad of barriers, predominantly related to ineffective education policies, imprecise legislation, unprofessional behaviour of teachers and principals and problematic relationship with parents. We also found that the principals felt that they needed to greatly improve their competencies from all six areas of the Standards of the competencies of principals of educational institutions. The paper offers recommendations to policy makers about the needed improvements.