Al Khalifa, Hala;
(2024)
School Improvement and Turnaround in Bahrain Public
Schools: A Multiple Case Study.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
The past decades have witnessed a remarkably consistent effort by educational policy makers and the Ministry of Education of Bahrain to reform schools by holding them more publicly accountable for enhancing student performance and overall school improvement. With the establishment of the Education & Training Quality Authority (BQA) in 2008, public schools went under intensive inspection reviews conducted by the BQA. Public schools are currently under their fourth cycle of school reviews (with each cycle averaging 4 years). Within the period of the school review cycles, were underperforming schools able to improve to good or better? If so, what are the best practices and common trends of these turnaround schools? This study aims to utilize a qualitative multiple case study approach to gain a better understanding of how the district, school leadership and staff managed to successfully turn schools around. In order to better understand the mechanisms behind school success it is vital to make comparisons between successful and ‘failing’ schools. As such, this study also includes case studies of ‘stuck’ schools which are public schools that are continuously judged as ‘inadequate’ (4) by the BQA inspection agency for three cycles of review from the period of 2009 to 2019. The study identifies the main external and internal factors that have either promoted or inhibited improvement in the case study schools such as leadership, building capacity and collaboration, many of which overlap with school turnaround and school effectiveness literature. This is aligned with concepts espoused in Fiedler’s Contingency Theory, that emphasize that what makes an organization or school effective is dependent on contextual (contingency factors) that can be both internal and external to the organization. The findings from this study contribute to a better understanding of school improvement and turnaround, more specifically within the context of a more centralized system within the Arab Region.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | School Improvement and Turnaround in Bahrain Public Schools: A Multiple Case Study |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Learning and Leadership |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10201700 |
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