The Impact of the Swedish National Principal Training Programme on Principals’ Leadership and the Structuration Process of School

Abstract

Principals have an important function in schools’ ability to create high-quality learning and teaching. As the expectations placed on principals are high, large resources are invested in school leadership training, and with that comes the need to study the impact of such initiatives. In this article, we report on longitudinal research studying the training programme for principals in Sweden. The aim was to examine the programme’s impacts on the principals’ leadership and on school organisations. We did this by interviewing principals, teachers and students at four schools during the principals’ participation in the programme. Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration was used to analyse the study. The results showed that leadership needs to be foregrounded throughout the training and that awareness of the function of principals in leading schools’ structuration processes should be clarified (i.e., the creation of meaning making).