School leaders reportedly choose their career first and foremost to widen their creative scope and to gain more responsibility and autonomy. Despite a high level of German school leaders’ job satisfaction in general, one fifth thinks about leaving (Cramer et al, 2021). This is all the more alarming, as there is an increasing shortage in Germany. School leaders face the difficulty of not only administrating their schools, but also setting them up for to better manage crises through school development in the long term (Pietsch et al., 2021). This situation has been further aggravated by the protective measures during the COVID 19-pandemic in early 2020. But how was school leaders’ daily work, be it pedagogical or organizational, affected by school closures? With what challenges were schools and school leaders faced during that time? And how did school leaders’ work change regarding stress, uncertainty, burn-out, and work satisfaction? These and other questions were approached within a survey of a representative sample of German school leaders before and during the first school closures due to the COVID 19-pandemic (Nt1 = 405; Nt2 = 306, of which 70% participated repeatedly). The sample was recruited via e-mail invitation as part of regular multi-topic surveys by the German field service provider forsa ensuring that each member of the population had the same statistical chance to be included in this study. Sample characteristics (age, gender, school form, region) correspond largely with official statistics from the German Federal Statistical Office about staff at public schools with minor deviations taken into account by weighting procedures.
According to initial analysis, school leaders experienced their schools’ work as rather successful indicating, that even under pandemic conditions the achievement of educational goals is possible. Insufficient equipment in students’ families and at schools, but also staff deficiencies in ICT skills were reported as main factors that impeded distance learning. However, even though school leaders reported a decrease in job satisfaction and an increase of tasks with uncertain outcomes, more than 50% reported less stress and no significant rise in burn-out symptoms. However, systematic differences between rural and urban regions further indicate that despite the crucial role of technology during school closures, schools in sparsely populated regions (but also in part in metropolitan areas) were more severely disadvantaged by the digital divide.
Compared to other school leaders around the globe (McLeold & Dulsky, 2020), German principals appeared to have fared comparatively well through the pandemic. This could be indicative of the governance structures of German schools being somewhat resilient in the face of crisis (but also resistant to change, cf. Hayward et al., in preparation). Nonetheless, like many schools all over the world (e.g., Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021), German schools struggled to shift to effective distance learning. One possible reason is that German school leaders traditionally put a lot of effort into administration, but less in innovation. Particularly in global crises like the COVID 19-pandemic, inequity in education is exacerbated by that, but obviously creates opportunities for change, too.