A good Principal will need to understand and address the ‘critical success factors’ involved in managing a school. Some of these critical success factors will be — student achievement, faculty resources, general school management and administration and school image in the immediate publics as well as the general publics. The Principal will need to understand the external environment in which a school works — the State or the Central Board, educational/ governmental agencies; competing schools, parents, local politicians; press & media, other private agencies interacting with the schools etc., and also the internal environment of the school — student learning and assessment (quality of teaching, testing, reporting and further educational intervention), teacher recruitment, motivation and retention, student & teacher safety, general support-staff recruitment, school management, school infrastructure and upkeep, best utilization of the resources at hand etc. apart from how he/ she wishes to be viewed by students, parents, teachers and other stakeholders in the people chain interacting with the school. Visioning will be a great asset for the Principal. Experience tells us that some Principals, because they have the vision and the will to execute it, have built very respectable schools around us.

A Principal will need to inculcate the academic insights and the managerial qualities too. He/ she will need to be somewhere in the middle of this continuum. A strong ‘School Leadership Program’ at Indus Learning addresses the above issues. All such programs are customized to the need of the specific schools.