Robison and others 2007; Valentine and Practer, 2011).<sup>1</sup> These factors may make school principals reluctant to admit difficulties with fulfilling their managerial role effectively.

Additionally, it is important to note that the questionnaires used by both TIMSS and PIRLS to measure school safety do not measure leadership capabilities or style. However, results from the TIMSS and PIRLS assessments demonstrate that high occurrences of disciplinary issues (vandalism, violence and so on) beyond momentary class disturbance, as measured by principals, have adverse effects on students and teachers.<sup>2</sup> The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) questionnaire includes a disciplinary climate index. The index describes what is happening in the classroom, and during lessons, according to students. It is not meant to reflect what happens outside the classroom. Its main purpose is to serve as a proxy for time on task, which is a key determinant of school quality. The underlying assumption is that the less disruption the classroom witnesses, the more students can focus on learning.

Classroom disciplinary climate is measured by five simple questions in the PISA survey, which have been asked quite consistently since the first round in 2000. These questions are meant to gauge the extent to which teachers lose learning time because of disciplinary issues. These five items are used to derive a disciplinary index, using either a simple factor decomposition or a likelihood-maximizing estimator. In both approaches, the reliability of the measure is very high, as witnessed by Cronbach’s alpha of 0.88 and KMO tests above 0.85 for the five variables. The disciplinary climate is also quite consistent across time for a given country as the items have remained identical in all rounds (see Appendix A for further details).

The focus comes both from the perspective of supporting future well-being and skills for children and youth to thrive in an ever-changing world, and from the perspective of lost years of schooling and the need for teachers to have the tools to manage classrooms and impart students with a valuable learning experience.

**Determinants of School Safety and Classroom Disciplinary Climate in MENA**

School safety and classroom disciplinary climate tend to be much lower in the MENA region. The level of school safety varies across MENA countries. However, on average, school safety tends to be more problematic in the MENA region compared to other regions by approximately 0.4 of a standard deviation. For instance, vandalism affects one in three schools in MENA, compared to 12 percent in other regions.<sup>3</sup> In the Syrian Arab Republic, Morocco, the Republic of Yemen, Tunisia, and the Arab Republic of Egypt, more than half the schools report vandalism as a moderate or serious issue (Figure 1). Additionally, approximately 30 percent of the schools report fights between students as a serious concern and half the schools report that fights and intimidation are a moderate or serious issue in school. In comparison, fights between students and staff intimidation by students are rarely reported by school principals as moderate or serious issues outside the region, affecting on average only 8 and 6 percent of schools across all non-MENA regions, respectively. Moreover, data on the classroom disciplinary climate reveal that, on average, approximately a third of students in the PISA participating countries from the MENA region report frequent classroom disturbances, compared to 20 percent in other countries excluding MENA (Figure 2).

> 1 <mark>Transformational leadership is a concept created by Burns (1978 and Bass 1985) in which a leader works in cooperation with their subordinates to identify the changes needed, to create a vision to guide the change through inspiration, and to execute the change in cooperation with the team. T</mark> he meta-analysis brought forward by the authors indicates especially that students from schools where principals ensure orderly learning conditions tend to perform better. 2 As teachers may be subject to higher occurrences of intimidation, threat and assault by students in schools much affected by low safety.

> 3 This includes regions covered by the TIMSS and PIRLS assessments for the years 2007 to 2015.

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