Developing the Leadership Capability of School Principals at Public Intermediate Schools in Kuwait

Kuwait is facing a set of challenges in its education system. Some of these challenges are related to the quality of education and some are related to school administration, especially in training programmes and leadership skills. To avoid these challenges, the Kuwait Ministry of Education has established a long-term strategy to reform the education system, and the Ministry gives the schools the main value in this strategy. These challenges increase the pressure on school leaders. Consequently, the quality of school principals is significant in these reforms; they should have the capability to lead the schools during the reform process. Educational leadership is given wide attention across the world because of its position in schools and thus in our lives. Therefore, schools need to be guided by leaders of a high quality, which prepared well to give them the capability to be effective leaders. This is a research project aims to help with the development of the leadership capability of principals in intermediate schools in Kuwait by looking closely at their skills and the preparation and development programmes that are available to them. Ten intermediate school principals will be interviewed in order to understand directly from them the qualities that they consider school principals need to lead public schools in Kuwait and whether or not their preparation was good. It also aims to explore different leader preparation programmes that are now available in other countries and to look at which ones may be suitable for the Kuwaiti context.