Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Recent Portuguese educational policy is focused on granting schools a higher degree of autonomy with
a view to the increasement of curriculum flexibility and the consequent improvement of learning among
students. After a pilot experiment with around 225 schools involved in the “Project for Autonomy and
Curriculum Flexibility” (PACF) in the school year of 2017/18, in the current school year (2018/19) all
Portuguese schools were invited to join the Program, which enables them up to 25% curriculum
flexibility. This is a big challenge for schools and school leaders, which drives them towards the adoption
of increasingly instructional leadership practices, i.e. being essentially focused on curriculum and
instruction.
An open-ended questionnaire was applied to the universe of Portuguese school leaders who attended
specific training sessions for the PACF (n=308), in order to collect their perceptions on the program’s
strengths and weaknesses and suggestions for its improvement.
A content analysis of a sample (n=35) of the answers given to the questionnaire reveals that the most
positive aspect they point out is the possibility to get together with other school leaders and share their
concerns, as well as good practices. This result shows that Portuguese schools still work very isolated
from each other and that they could benefit from establishing professional learning communities that
could bring an important contribution to their organizational development. On the other hand, the
respondents are struggling with difficulties in motivating teachers to adopt innovative pedagogic
practices and to manage the curriculum in a more integrated way. Another important obstacle to a
successful implementation of the program seems to be the fact that Portuguese school leaders feel they
are overloaded with paperwork and platform management, by the demand of the Ministry of Education,
which forces them to be more focused on bureaucracy than on the curriculum and instruction.
Description
Keywords
School autonomy Curriculum flexibility Instructional leadership Bureaucracy
Citation
Cabral, I., Alves, J. M., Soares, D., & Palmeirão, C. (2019). Bureaucratic or instructional leaders? An overview of portuguese school leaders’ perceptions on an autonomy and curriculum flexibility program. EDULEARN19 Proceedings. Presented at the 11th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies. https://doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2019.1723
