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Article Excerpt
In this article, we report data from two projects concerned with the aspirant principals' perspectives about school principal recruitment in three Australian states. In particular, we consider what our informants perceive as factors that inhibit the realisation of their aspirations. These factors include aspects of the operation of school-based processes of application and selection. Principal aspirants regard selection as a game that works to the advantage of internal applicants for advertised vacancies. We analyse a number of dimensions of the selection game and we liken the bias towards internal candidates as a form of personnel cloning. Finally, we consider some possible explanations for this practice and review its wider significance in respect of the themes of risks, risk-taking and risk aversion in employment recruitment.
Keywords
employment status
labour utilisation
employment opportunities
occupational surveys
labour market
promotion (occupational)
Introduction
It cannot be supposed ... that a bureaucracy operating in an environment which is dangerous to it or is regarded as such, which is surrounded by earthly foes or perceives itself as encircled by dangerous supernatural forces, will give the recruitment of expert personnel a more salient place than the reinforcement of loyalty (Gouldner, 1958, pp. 465-6).
In this article, we discuss an emerging trend in leadership replenishment which has surfaced in the data from two research projects. This trend is the increased predilection of government primary and secondary schools in some Australian states in the making of appointments to advertised principal class vacancies to nominate internal applicants, that is, candidates from within the school, in preference to external applicants. We characterise this trend as a form of role cloning; hence the notion of 'cloning their own'. By cloning we do not have in mind the employment of personnel who literally replicate their departing predecessors in temperament, attributes, skills and styles; rather, we are attempting to capture the idea that schools are tending to play safe by choosing one of their own. That is, the selection panels that act on behalf of schools and their communities are seeking to ensure that the persons to whom they accord senior level responsibilities are known, as distinct from unknown, quantifies. This tendency is a way of seeking to guarantee that new appointees fit a preferred mould, or are deemed able to be moulded, the assumption being that such moulding is more likely to occur if appointees come from within the school where they may have already been socialised in preferred ways in prior lead-up roles consistent with the overall leadership culture of a school. One of our aspirant informants (A#9) summed this expectation up rather pithily as follows:
I think that ... asking people to be so concise [in preparing their written applications] schools are essentially saying: 'We are really not interested in taking any chances. We know exactly what it is that we want and so we will just go through this process.'
Another aspirant believed that, in wider circumstances of relative career immobility for teachers, such 'looking after your own' is both inevitable and desirable (A#10):
People are always going to try and support their own staff [members] if they think they are good. I would hope that would always be the case. If your staff [members] have served your school well, then you are not going to treat them poorly, hopefully.
Our hypothesis is that while this trend may be discounted as an atypical outcome of school-based selection policies and procedures, it might also be viewed more pertinently as a deliberate risk aversive strategy by schools, the intention of which is to avoid any undesirable outcomes of local selection.
This article analyses a selection of data from two research projects: Identifying and Tracking Principal Aspirants (ITPA) and Principal Aspirations and Recruitment amidst Leadership Disengagement (PRALD). In the following sections of the article, we outline the background to both projects; briefly summarise our methodology; and consider a number of features of school-based selection, including the intended and unintended consequences, and aspirants' coping strategies. We conclude by discussing the overall significance of our findings, in particular their implications for occupational identity formation and the emotional vulnerability experienced by aspirants during role transition.
Background to the research
For about a decade, there has been a concern with actual and anticipated shortages in the supply of principals. While this concern is international, the incidence of it is not globally uniform. This concern is voiced by professional associations, journalists, politicians, policy analysts, researchers and employers. The strength of this concern is evident in the increased amount of recent academic writing devoted to principal shortages, some of which is discussed below. On the other hand, the phenomenon of shortage is bedevilled by conflicting perceptions, and an absence of agreement about what counts as a shortage and as evidence of a shortage.
Issues of Definition
There are two main dimensions to principal supply. The first is quantitative while the second is qualitative. From a quantitative perspective, a necessary pre-condition of a shortage of appointees is a demand for replacements to a position, so that if there are no current or projected vacancies to be filled then shortage is not an issue. In this situation, then, assuming that there are applicants at the ready, supply will exceed demand. If, on the other hand, there are current and/or projected vacancies, then a shortage exists when the ratio of applicants to job vacancies is low, as when only ninety people apply for 100 positions, so that there is a shortage often. But a shortage may mean more than this. Suppose that a five-year trend of an average of twenty applications for each of those 100 vacancies dips in year six to an average of three applications per vacancy. This means that for year six the overall pool of potential appointees has dried up significantly from 2000 to 300. If 300 applicants per 100 vacancies becomes the trend for the next five-year period, then a pool problem has been transformed into a pipeline problem. Employing authorities that require principal applicants to obtain certification, for example, a principal's certificate, may be able to identify reduced pipeline flows.
Is such a decline, that is, from twenty to three applicants per vacancy, interpretable as a shortage? Possibly, given that twenty is an average figure, in which case the numbers of applicants for some vacancies may be much lower. Thus, shortages are unlikely to be experienced uniformly, so that some locations experience an over-supply and others an under-supply. Roza et al. (2003, p. 14) for example, suggest that while 'there are far more people "qualified" for a principalship in the United States than there are jobs for them to fill', supply problems exist in pockets. (The USA has a national average of seventeen applicants for every principal vacancy--down ten per cent over a seven-year period.) As an illustration, in 2002 one Californian school district received forty applicants for every vacancy while another 'just twelve miles down the road' received an average of four (Roza et al., 2003, p. 23). These kinds of applicant distributional preference patterns may be compounded by qualitative considerations. Thus, while a selection panel which desires to make what it deems to be a good quality appointment requires only one 'good' applicant to do so, an absence of quality may be more obvious to it when its pool of applicants is reduced. Quality considerations are also slippery because selectors' prototypes of candidate acceptability shift. Roza et al. (2003, p. 31) argue that in the USA the shift has been upwards. Thus, school districts have created their own recruitment difficulties by 'searching for characteristics beyond minimal state certification requirements'. Then, 'by defining an idealised set of attributes that they seek in principal candidates (who, after all, walk on water)', they make hiring decisions 'that bear little relationship to the attributes sought'. For these reasons, then, the topic of principal supply is a knotty one and claims about shortages should be treated with caution.
Australian Research
Evidence of principal shortages is difficult to obtain. In Victoria, some data exists for the period 1999-2001 (see Table 1), when the average number of applications for each advertised principal vacancy was approximately seven, with the average number of secondary applications per vacancy for the period slightly higher than primary applications, although this is not evident in the table. The smallness of this figure in absolute terms probably means that some schools selected candidates from very restricted interview shortlists or may even have had no applicants. Moreover, given that candidates often submit applications for multiple vacancies and may be preferred by a number of schools, in some cases schools may have had a very limited opportunity to secure their first preferences or may not have had an acceptable candidate. Indeed, in 1999, in one rural region a mere twenty-seven candidates applied for eight secondary schools between them, an average of about three per school. It is also evident that females mostly comprised less than forty per cent of all applicants.
Possible factors affecting future principal supply have been the subject of research in Victoria and New South Wales, in both the government and non-government schooling sectors. The bulk of this research has documented the principalship aspirations of assistant principals and teachers, and the factors that make for the attractiveness or unattractiveness of the principal role in the...
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