Analysis of effects of head teachers leadership styles on the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education performance in Public Primary Schools in Makadara District-Nairobi County.

Abstract

Management of people in the school context involves skillful control and guidance of pupils, teaching staff and non-teaching staff to achieve the school’s desired outcomes. The head teacher plays an important role in this respect. The nature and quality of leadership and management that the head teacher provides determine the effectiveness of the school. This study sought to analyze the head teacher’s leadership styles and how it contributes to the performance of KCPE examinations in public primary schools in Makadara Districts. The study sought to fulfill several objectives mainly to examine the extent to which leadership styles adopted by the head teacher have an influence on schools performance in the KCPE examination in Makadara. The independent variable was leadership styles; the dependent variable was the performance. The relationship between the variables was investigated to determine the strength of coefficient determinants between them. The locale of the study was Makadara District in Nairobi County. The target population was 26 public primary schools. The researcher sampled two schools for piloting. Two head teachers, two deputies and six teachers were selected by the researcher for piloting. A total of 8 schools were used for the main study. A total of 10 Head Teachers, 10 deputy head teachers and 120 teachers were randomly sampled for the study. Literature review was carried out under the concept of leadership and the role of leadership in education institutions. The researcher used descriptive correlation design to determine the relationship between the variables. Two questionnaires were used to collect data each consisting of 23 simple statements on which the respondents were able to rate their school heads on five point scale. The instruments were piloted before being administered to measure their reliability. Data analysis was done using descriptive statistics. Pearsons correlation was used to determine the relationship between leadership styles of head teachers and the performance. The study found out that there is a relationship between the leadership styles adapted by the head teacher on the curriculum delivery by the teachers which in turn affects the performance of learners in the exam. The finding may be useful to institutions of higher learning and KEMI for the development of teaching materials for leadership training for head teachers and other leaders in similar organizations.