Senior Leaders’ Perspectives and Experiences of School Quality in Mainstream Secondary Schools in Kazakhstan

Abstract

Kazakhstani secondary education has undergone numerous reforms lately. Policies, which pertain the changes in curriculum, classroom assessment practices, professional development for teachers and school leaders, school attestation model, school principals’ rotations and others, aim at improving the quality of school education. However, there are few empirical studies on conceptualizing school quality. Hence, the purpose of this study was to explore how school senior leaders (principals and vice-principals) understand and define school quality, which factors they perceive as influencing school quality, and which strategies school senior leaders apply for enhancing quality in mainstream schools. Thus, through the lenses of an interpretative paradigm, I employed a qualitative approach to conceptualize school quality, factors affecting it and strategies for its’ improvement. Within the qualitative approach, a single case-study method was utilized. The research participants were school senior leaders including two school principals and nine vice-principals at two mainstream schools in Southern Kazakhstan. The qualitative data, obtained from 19 individual semi-structured interviews, the researcher’s field notes and document analysis, were analyzed thematically. Research findings revealed that educational leaders interpreted school quality in terms of facilities, student learning, stakeholder motivation, teacher competencies, experience and qualifications, child pastoral care, and as evaluations and assessments. In this study, three different levels of factors, affecting quality, were identified: school-level, education system-level and wider community level. With regards to strategies used by school senior leaders to improve quality, main themes such as leadership practices, school-based management, school development planning were identified. This study was guided by Complex Adaptive Systems (Palmberg, 2009; Roberts, 2024) as a theoretical framing. The findings of this study indicate that Kazakhstani school senior leaders in mainstream schools do not simply implement reforms but act as adaptive agents who interpret and enact school quality within evolving contextual constraints, where their role is less about executing static responsibilities than about navigating a living, shifting system in which relationships, resources, policies, and local priorities continually interact.