Strategic Leadership Practices and Academic Performance in Public Secondary Schools in Kericho County, Kenya
Authors: Bett Winrose C , Bett Shadrack 
Published: November 2021

Academic performance among learners has been pulled into much consideration in the worldwide field in this manner, requiring the execution of the essential procedures to help improve and keep up performance in auxiliary schools. Strategic leadership practices are fundamental in schools due to the changing climate, unpredictable, dubious, and vague. It stays to be one of the significant impacts on the academic performance of understudies in auxiliary schools. The examination tries to discover the strategic leadership practices and academic performance in open auxiliary schools in Kericho County, Kenya. The essential objective of the study was; to inspect the impacts of strategic leadership styles, the stakeholder's involvement, resource allocation, and school laws and guidelines on academic performance in public secondary schools in the Kericho county. This investigation was founded on Path-goal theory, transformational leadership approach, and trait leadership theory. The investigation utilized a descriptive examination design because the design focuses on finding relationships between variables. A stratified random sampling method was utilized to choose the respondents from the sampling outline. The objective populace for the examination was 540 subjects. The sample size of the examination was 108, including 18 school heads, 36 departmental heads, and 54 class educators in optional schools in Kericho County. Information was gathered utilized an organized survey with both open and closed questionnaires. Information was dissected by use of both descriptive and inferential statistics with the guide of SPSS software. The outcomes were introduced in different configurations, including diagrams, pie graphs, and recurrence tables. Cronbach's alpha was used to estimate the degree of reliability of the exploration instruments. The ANOVA and T test were used in data analysis to generate quantitative reports through tabulations, percentages, frequencies and measures of central tendency. The study found out that there is a significant relationship between strategic leadership practices and academic performance. The study found out that the leadership style, stakeholder’s involvement, resource allocation, and school rules and regulations greatly influence academic performance in public secondary schools in Kericho County, Kenya. According to the study, the principal should use the most appropriate leadership styles that facilitate collective responsibility in order to create a conducive environment for teaching and learning; school management should develop capacity building programs to empower both the principal and teachers in their leadership skills and styles; and teachers should be involved. To guarantee that academic performance in the region is improved, the principal should work closely with school boards of management and the ministry of education. Besides, there is need for keen management of schools and continuous meetings between the principal, teachers, and the parents for planning and monitoring academic progress of the pupils. Lastly, the recruitment of principals and teachers should be taken as a serious practice by the teacher’s service Commission to ensure the deployment of the most qualified and experienced principals and teachers.