Abstract:
Leadership standards or frameworks describing capabilities for school leaders have become common in
today’s educational landscape. Recently, Cambodia crafted a draft Professional Competency Standards
for School Principals in General Education (PCSSPGE) in response to contemporary educational trends.
This study investigated the current knowledge and perceptions of Cambodian secondary school
principals, in one school district, regarding their progress toward implementation of the draft PCSSPGE.
Mixed methods were employed utilising a questionnaire with 12 purposively selected principals to gain
insights into their leadership capabilities in implementing the draft PCSSPGE. Subsequent semi-structured
interviews with five volunteers were conducted to acquire in-depth perceptions of their
leadership capabilities, challenges, and support required to implement the draft PCSSPGE. Descriptive
statistical measures from questionnaire data combined with thematic analysis from interview data
informed the findings.
Participants perceived the draft PCSSPGE as a managerial-based framework, likely due to their
substantial engagement in managerial and administrative work requirements. They collectively perceived
Personal Excellence as their most capable domain, particularly managing personal effectiveness.
Personal qualities and support from the system leaders were identified as contributing factors to this
capability. Despite Stakeholder Engagement collectively reported from the questionnaire data as the
second most capable domain, interview transcripts revealed challenges caused by non-engagement from
stakeholders, particularly parents and community who had limited educational background.
The participants collectively perceived least capability in exercising Strategic Thinking and Innovation,
particularly making informed decisions. This was linked to the principals’ leadership knowledge gap and
centralised processes of the Cambodian education system that maintained principals’ focus on managerial
tasks. Participants also perceived less capability within Managerial Leadership, specifically managing
school resources and systems largely due to the insufficiency of resources, including school finance, learning facilities and human resources. Suggested support for implementation of the draft PCSSPGE
included a systemwide change of principals’ recruitment criteria, training before implementing the draft
PCSSPGE, and continuous support and monitoring of the implementation.
Implications of this study suggest that improvement in the quality of Cambodian education would also
require parental and community engagement with educational matters and increased resourcing for
schools to enable principals to shift from being managers to instructional leaders.