title: Educational leadership and the turn to empowerment
Creators: name: Alghamdi, Abeer Saeed Mesfer
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2023

description: Modern leadership and management have multiple methods and facets, focusing as a whole on introducing advanced concepts for dealing with the administrative work system. Among these concepts, old in their inception but new in their application, is the concept of empowerment, a concept that a number of organisations have begun to adopt to enhance institutional quality. This concept is derived from the word ‘power’, and if translated it into Arabic the meaning of empowerment is maintained. In considering empowerment as an administrative concept, most definitions agree that empowerment is concerned with granting employees higher levels of authority related to their work and issues within their job specialisation, liberating them from the control specified by instructions and granting them more freedom to take responsibility for their own opinions, decisions, applications, and actions. This power takes several forms, according to the specialisation in which it is applied, and in the science of management there are a group of elements that can be considered aspects of strength that enable the employee to perform their work better, such as authority, responsibility, knowledge, appearance, technology, relationships, money, and charisma. But the process of empowerment is far beyond the process of giving the employee authority, as it covers a wider circle that includes knowledge, technical level and self-confidence, and these self-skills, if put in the right mould, will provide the organisation with the best results in terms of work outcomes . As a result, some countries around the world have tended to reform their educational and administrative systems to improve educational system quality and, in light of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s orientations toward developing education systems, empowerment emerged as one of the most important objectives of the 2030 development plan and vision. Hence the importance of this study, which is in line with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 and which, according to the researcher’s knowledge, is the first and only study that deals with the concept of empowerment in the education system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the trend towards decentralisation. This study also opens new horizons for researchers to conduct more studies on the empowerment approach and its effectiveness through its recommendations and results that may support policy and decision- makers in education, whether in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or globally, in order to achieve the desired goals of implementing the empowerment approach in order to achieve greater participation and a role for all members of society. the educational system in making decisions, solving problems, assuming responsibility, and developing work methods. Based on the above, the main objective of this study is to explore the concept of empowerment and the possibilities of education system enhancement from the application of an empowerment approach in relation to the revision of school leadership within Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. The research sought to investigate the understanding and perceptions of key stakeholders. In this research the data were collected by quantitative and qualitative methods using three types of research tools: questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions. These tools were simultaneously applied in order to produce a data set that could be explored in answering the questions driving this project in relation to the concept of empowerment and its potential for improving the educational system. Participants’ perspectives were explored using semi-structured interviews (conducted with eight officials from the Ministry of Education and school principals). Focus group discussions were conducted with four groups of teachers from secondary schools in different regions of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A questionnaire was distributed electronically to 200 secondary school teachers. The study discovered that there is a widespread belief that the empowerment approach can be of great value in the education system, and that the Ministry of Education must take a strong stance in spreading the culture of empowerment and increasing participation in achieving its implementation measures.