Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to propose some policy implications for improving the education sector’s innovation in schools through introducing ideas for leadership advancement, and shaping organizational culture and performance management. This chapter consists of two studies. In the first study, school principals and head teachers (n = 57) and teachers and support personnel (n = 501) from Estonian secondary schools were questioned. In the second study, 2,125 teachers and 296 principals from Estonian general education schools participated. For statistical analysis factor analysis, correlation analysis, analysis of variances and t-test were used. As a result of the two studies, several policy implications can be brought out to raise the effectiveness of general educational system and its ability to support innovation. For ensuring schools’ performance, performance management needs to be taken into consideration in school management. This includes dealing with organizational culture which supports both task- and relationship-oriented approach. Schools should not be only concentrated on achieving academic performance, but on managing and developing school environment. This includes valuing teachers’ work and their part in achieving schools’ objectives. Therefore, more attention should be turned to creating teachers’ motivational system (including pay-for-performance) as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Head teachers are subordinate to the principal in Estonia and, for example, coordinate the work of the teachers, mediate communication between principal, teachers, parents and pupils, and organize various school events, extra-curricular activities, etc.
- 2.
The reliability of the scales is quite high as the Cronbach alphas are over 0.7. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) statistic is 0.7, which means that the factor solution is stable.
- 3.
The reliability of the scales of orientations of organizational culture are, respectively, 0.79 for task orientation and 0.78 for relationship orientation. The KMO test statistic is 0.90 which shows that the factor solution is stable.
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Acknowledgments
This article was prepared with financial support received from target financing project SF0180037s08 and the Estonian Science Foundation Grant No 7018.
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Aidla, A., Irs, R., Türk, K. (2012). Creating Innovation in the Education Sector: Policy Implications. In: Carayannis, E., Varblane, U., Roolaht, T. (eds) Innovation Systems in Small Catching-Up Economies. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management, vol 15. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1548-0_19
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