ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the linkages between different levels of education systems to explore how they support, or may inhibit, school leadership policy in Malaysia. There is a contrast between strongly hierarchical and centralised education systems, such as that in Malaysia, and more devolved systems, where more decisions are made at local or school level. A central question for Malaysia is whether sufficient contextualisation was undertaken before the Blueprint was implemented. The Blueprint identifies four specific strategies: Principal selection, principal training, instructional leadership, and distributed leadership. The global and Malaysian evidence both reinforce the need to give a high priority to leadership when addressing policy reform. The extent to which stakeholders, professional and lay, accept and ‘own’ the new policy, is critical to its successful implementation. The success or failure of policy reform depends on two overlapping considerations, acceptability and feasibility.
