title: Policies and practices of and conditions for professional development for middle leaders in Chinese higher vocational colleges
Creators: name: Zhang, Ni
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2025

description: Previous studies have confirmed that middle leadership can have a positive impact on institutional governance and change. However, related theoretical conceptions were developed in Western contexts, raising questions about its suitability for Asian contexts, including China, where education systems are highly centralised. Reform efforts in professional development for middle leaders (PD for MLs) lack an informed view through the absence of empirical research in China. There is a reliance on learning from the experience and achievements of research on PD and MLs conducted in other countries. Notably, differences in social background and organisational characteristics make it ineffective to draw on practical experience from Western countries directly. This runs counter to contemporary understandings of the importance of context for system improvement efforts. Conducting localised research in China is therefore a key to institutional reform and enhancing the quality and training of educational institutions.

This study, positioned in Chinese higher vocational colleges (CHVCs), attempts to explore analysing the PD and capacity-building issues for MLs in the Chinese hierarchical education system. Specifically, this study aims to answer two main research questions: 1. What is the status of current provision for PD for MLs in CHVCs? 2. In what ways and to what extent do institutional leadership, organisational structure, and organisational culture influence PD for MLs in CHVCs? This study adopted a qualitative phenomenology approach and research methods include document analysis of policies from central, provincial, and institutional level, as well as semi-structured interviews with MLs from sampling CHVCs in Shandong Province. Grounded theory coding method is adopted as a generic approach to organise and interpret the data. On the basis of drawing a basic blueprint for PD for MLs in CHVCs, this study further explores the specific ways in which organisational conditions promote or hinder PD for MLs.

By juxtaposing research findings from different dimensions, this study analyses three basic manifestations and characteristics of professional development in CHVCs. Moreover, the combination of documentary data and interview data with middle leaders, five potential implementation challenges are identified - unbalanced allocation of learning resource, conflict of structural arrangements, internal tension between autonomy and control, ignorance of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) practice, and ambiguous assessment of learning outcomes. This study further demonstrated that the role and conditions of institutions are clearly relevant to the middle leadership construction and the realisation of the institutional governance vision. As such, the mitigation of such challenges can be explained by collective endeavours involving leadership, structure and culture at institutional levels. The findings emphasise the importance of effective institutional leadership in developing PD for MLs practices in CHVCs, and how organisational structure and culture fundamentally shape the form and implementation of PD. Understanding these Chinese-based factors in professional development can help further enrich the knowledge base that has traditionally been generated in non-Chinese contexts.