Leading for school effectiveness: A Hong Kong study

The increasing demand on school principals to raise student achievement in the accountability era has brought the attention of researchers back from transformational leadership to instructional leadership. Traditionally, these two leadership types have been considered separately in the literature. While researchers often advocate one type in favour of the other, this study argues that both types are important to schools and attempts to simultaneously examine their influence on school effectiveness. Based on the empirical data collected from 48 Hong Kong secondary schools, the results have shown that the schools with stronger orientation towards both instructional leadership and transformational leadership outperformed the schools with weaker inclination on both leadership styles. Discussion in the Hong Kong context is provided.