Challenges Facing the International School Leaders in Saudi Arabia and Strategies Developed to Overcome Them

Abstract

Using qualitative grounded theory, this paper aim to investigate the challenges facing international school leadership in Saudi Arabia. Data and information are collected from published researches, governmental reports, and academic experts’ opinions and stories. The significance of this paper is its contribution to the limited academic literature in this area, and it is hoped that the findings to be useful to inform policy makers and educate them about the challenging situation for international school leaders while they are doing their jobs. Those schools are a crucial part of the education system and provide quality education to millions of student Saudi nationals and foreigners. However, they operate a liberal approach to education which does not align with the conservative nature of the community. This situation creates many challenges for the school leaders that they need to deal with on a daily basis. The literature review chapter highlighted a number of serious challenges faced by international school leaders in Saudi Arabia mainly related to the MOE framework and restriction, staffing and human resource problems due to high turnover among leaders, and managing parents’ expectations, among many others. The copying strategies developed by those leaders to overcome and mitigate these challenges is the second topic this paper is interested in researching. The reviewed literature shows that compliance and circumvention are the two major copying strategies developed by school leaders. Compliance with the MOE framework and policy,meaning they were not able to develop or introduce new policies, rather go with the ministry. Circumvention is another coping strategy where some school leaders try to bypass the rules lying to the ministry, and keep it quiet within the school. Also, this paper investigates how leaders perceive their leadership role in a highly challenging environment. Given their unique structure, and role, international school faces more challenges than public schools. It takes a proud leader to lead any of these schools. While many of them burn out and leave their role as they cannot handle the pressure and mounting challenges, they have to face day in and day out. Through this paper, we will learn how leaders perceive their leadership role, and whether these challenges help them be creative and think outside the box. Limitations and delimitations are presented and discussed in this study as well. The study concluded with a recommendation for more research and studies in this area