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In Ontario Canada, being a vice principal is not considered a career goal. Rather, school principals are drawn from the ranks of practising vice principals. Potential administrators must first pass the principal qualification program and spend several successful years in the interim position of vice principal (known as assistant principal, deputy principal, and assistant headmaster in other countries) before applying for the principalship itself. The current system appears to be replete with inherent challenges both for vice principals and the educational stakeholders they serve. Administrator training is based on a quantitative paradigm, but the vice principal role is highly qualitative in nature, requiring strong interpersonal skills to address conflict for which no training is provided. The current system addresses the dual role of management and leadership but from the perspective of the principal, not the vice principal. Training also favors management over leadership, yet hiring processes for vice principals place a high value on demonstrated leadership. Facility with ethical decision-making is central to the vice principal role yet absent from qualification programs. Qualification programs use classroom-based learning with no “in-role” field experience. Mentoring systems designed to provide new vice principals with help are inadequate for supporting daily tasks. As a consequence, newly appointed vice principals find themselves in a role for which they have not been trained.

This study aims to explore the challenges reported by Israeli school vice-principals regarding their relationships with principals and teachers. The study examines two questions: (1) How do vice-principals perceive the challenges involved in their relationships with principals and teachers? and (2) How do they respond to these challenges?

The study employed a qualitative approach to explore the challenges encountered by Israeli school vice-principals in their relationships with principals and teachers. Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 17 vice-principals, allowing for an in-depth understanding of their perspectives and experiences.

The findings of the study highlight three challenges mentioned by the research participants: bridging between principals and teachers, maintaining complete loyalty to both sides and middle-ground responsibility for the school.

This study enriches the existing literature on vice-principals by investigating their distinct position as intermediaries bridging teachers and principals. It offers valuable insights into the challenges they encounter in their interactions with both parties, as well as their strategies to tackle these issues. Through the application of role theory, the research deepens comprehension of the intricate nature of the vice-principals' role, providing pragmatic suggestions for improvement.

Literature on vice‐principals that aims to get a better understanding of their roles, role perceptions in school management, and their attitudes towards school management have revealed that the vice‐principalship is one of the least researched and least discussed. The purpose of this paper is to explore the facets of job satisfaction among Turkish vice‐principals.

Data were collected via a survey administered to 159 vice‐principals working for elementary schools in a city in the eastern part of Turkey and results were gathered by May 2010. A two‐part survey questionnaire was used to elicit responses from vice‐principals. The instrument consists of 31 items and asks respondents to indicate the extent of their agreement with each of the items on a four‐point Likert scale. In this study items were designed as a five‐point scale. There is a section to collect personal information. It was included together with an item asking for their career orientation.

The results confirmed that the job satisfaction of vice‐principals had four job facets: “professional commitment”, “sense of synchrony”, “sense of efficacy”, and “level of personal challenge”. The results showed that the facets of “sense of efficacy” and “sense of synchrony” were major sources of job satisfaction, and that the vice‐principals who had any educational administration degree felt themselves more effective and more synchronic. The vice‐principals who did not plan to be a principal felt themselves less effective when coping with work stress and balancing their work and personal lives.

The paper provides a better understanding of vice‐principals’ roles, role perceptions in school management, and their attitudes towards school management, and extends knowledge about the facets of job satisfaction among Turkish vice‐principals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the leadership role(s) of vice-principals in diverse, multi-ethnic schools and communities and understand the supervision and mentoring support they require to help them become more effective leaders within them. The research questions guiding this study were: what forms of mentoring do vice-principals, who serve in diverse schools in rapidly changing communities, require? Who is in the best position to provide mentoring for them?

The author used a qualitative case study methodology. Data that were analyzed for this paper were drawn from surveys, semi-structured interviews, one focus group interview and school and community documents from three data sets within two case studies in Canada. The first data set was part of the author’s doctoral research program in a diverse school in Alberta; the other case study was part of a larger collective case study that the author is currently involved with and leading in New Brunswick. Several vice-principals were part of both studies. The author then constructed a survey questionnaire specifically focused on mentoring vice-principals in diverse schools. Vice-principals in both provinces, who were part of the two studies, were invited to respond to the follow-up survey. Using a constant comparative analytical approach, the author coded and analyzed the data from all three sets together. The author formed several categories and ultimately collapsed the categories into five distinct themes that illustrated and confirmed the social realities of the vice-principals in their schools and communities.

Five key findings emerged from the analysis of the data sets. They were building leadership capacity, fostering positive relationships, increasing global awareness, reducing stress and anxiety and becoming a diversity champion and peace-builder.

To this researcher’s knowledge, this paper contributes to a significant gap in the literature on vice-principals who serve in diverse schools and communities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine leading from the middle, which is consistent with calls to distribute leadership, while expanding the direction of influence, from the normal top-down to include a bottom-up or lateral direction. The paper proposes that the position of the vice-principal enables the role incumbent to lead from the middle as a boundary spanner. The research question was what leadership from the middle looks like for vice-principals.

The study consisted of interviews of 28 vice-principals and 10 principals. A mixed case and theme-oriented strategy was adapted, with member checking with each vice-principal.

The findings indicate that in leading from the middle, vice-principals play boundary spanning roles of connecting, translating and brokering: (1) connecting between organisational levels, (2) translating between vision/direction and actualisation, (3) connecting between middle managers and (4) brokering and translating between the ministry and the school.

Leading from the middle is a nascent concept which is worth exploring, given the complexity of educational systems with multiple ecological levels, and the need for leadership to create coherence between the levels.

This report examines the function of experience in the role of vice‐principal as preparation for the school principalship, proposing that a dysfunctional socialization outcome of this career entry pattern is the development of a role orientation that emphasizes managing rather than leading the school. The authors differentiate these two dimensions of the administrative role by suggesting that the managerial function emphasizes organizational stability and maintenance of the day‐to‐day operation, and that the leadership function emphasizes improvements in instructional and organizational arrangements facilitating teaching and learning. While a balance in functions is the preferred orientation implicit in theoretical as well as prescriptive models of the principalship, and principals themselves espouse the desirability of an instructional leadership emphasis, most empirical studies of the principalship indicate a substantial skewing of emphasis in the direction of managerial activities. The paper offers an empirically grounded theoretical explanation of this occurrence. Based on data from the studies of the enculturation process and the work activities of vice‐principals, and guided by socialization theory, the report discusses role‐learning implications of experience in the vice‐principalship role and concludes with seven propositions for further study.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals in discharging their roles and to further explore their engagement in informal mentoring as a coping mechanism in the absence of a structured professional development program.

The qualitative study was conducted in the form of in-depth face-to-face, loosely structured individual interviews with ten informants from a variety of personal and school backgrounds, contributing to a set of data that unveiled the basic themes.

Three dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals were identified: juggling administrative work with teaching, standing by management or siding with peer teachers, and forced innovation vs omnipresent conservatism. The findings also suggested that the informants tended toward external resources intentionally with a view to gaining emotional support as well as professional stimulation. They also engaged in informal mentoring, which took the form of observing principals’ behaviors, joining support groups organized by school governing bodies, and enrolling in academic programs offered by universities and/or professional bodies, as a way to resolve the dilemmas.

Informal mentoring has been identified as an effective approach for Hong Kong vice-principals to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to overcome workplace challenges and the feelings of loneliness experienced upon changing their role. The findings point to the importance of formalizing mentoring in vice-principal development programs.

This study is the first of its kind to explore the impact of informal mentoring on vice-principals in Hong Kong where both dual-career track systems and a structured mentoring programs are missing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine first the job responsibilities undertaken by vice‐principals and second to investigate the respective contribution of each job responsibility in preparing them for the principalship. Because new principals are drawn predominantly from the ranks of vice‐principals in Hong Kong, it is important to examine whether their current experience adequately prepares vice‐principals to take up this senior position.

All vice‐principals in Hong Kong secondary schools were sent a questionnaire that asked for the extent of their involvement in various activities and their adequacy of preparation for the principalship. A sequential regression analysis was used to examine the effect of various job dimensions on the vice‐principals' perceived preparedness, over and above the effect of their demographic variables.

Seven job responsibility dimensions pertaining to the role of vice‐principals were identified. It was found that respondents spend most of their time on staff management and the least on resource management. Among the seven job dimensions, only strategic direction and policy environment were found to have an effect on their perceived preparation for the principalship.

The findings reflect that vice‐principals take their staff management and resource management responsibilities lightly as they do not perceive their extensive experience gained in staff management as an asset or their inadequate experience in resource management as a deficiency in preparing them for the principalship. As these two dimensions are the core elements of school‐based management, they deserve the attention of policy‐makers. In addition, policy‐makers should address the development of vice‐principals in the dimension of strategic direction and policy environment.

The paper, using a quantitative methodology, is the first to investigate the link between job responsibility dimensions and preparation for the principalship as perceived by vice‐principals.

The purpose of this study was to explore school principals' and vice-principals' perceptions of their strategies of coping with loneliness at work. The study posed two questions: (1) how do educational leaders perceive their strategies of coping with loneliness at work? (2) What are the differences in the style of coping with loneliness between school principals and vice-principals, as they perceive it?

Based on 41 semi-structured interviews with 22 school principals and 19 vice-principals three main coping strategies were found.

This study differentiated between three strategies for coping with a sense of loneliness in the workplace: (1) receiving support from within and outside of the school, (2) action-oriented coping strategy, and (3) perspective-focused coping strategy. Some of these strategies characterized school principals while others characterized vice-principals.

Educational leaders' familiarity with a variety of coping strategies with a sense of loneliness, appropriate to their specific difficulty should be expanded.

The issue of coping with loneliness has barely been explored in the context of leaders and managers. This issue is of particular importance, given the negative effects of loneliness on leaders' mental well-being and their functioning at work.

Although the importance of shared leadership to school success has been widely recognised in the literature, only scant attention has been paid to the feelings of vice‐principals over undertaking more responsibilities. Maintained by the researchers in this somewhat neglected area is the assertion that vice‐principals who find their jobs more satisfying have stronger desire for principalship whereas those experiencing less job satisfaction were more likely to wish to remain in their present roles. The feelings of vice‐principals towards their jobs thus warrant further investigation given the current shortage of principal applicants, which is predominately comprised of vice‐principals, in many places of the world. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

Taking into consideration that most of the studies on vice‐principalship in the literature have been descriptive and provided little empirical support, this study attempted to empirically verify the job satisfaction and desire for principalship link based on a quantitative survey covering vice‐principals in all Hong Kong secondary schools.

The results suggest that professional commitment, sense of efficacy and sense of synchrony are the three satisfaction factors affecting the desire of vice‐principals for becoming principals; the effect of the first two is positive whereas that of the last one is negative.

The negative relation between sense of synchrony and desire for principalship is worth noting; it suggested vice‐principals in Hong Kong who upheld the Chinese cultural value of workplace harmony had found it hard to strike a balance between maintaining a harmonious working relationship with colleagues and seeking for career advancement and thus chose to remain in their vice‐principal positions. The perceived tension between school performance and work harmony held by vice‐principals in Hong Kong is a crucial issue to be addressed by policy makers.

This paper is the first of its kind to investigate the direct link between job satisfaction and the career aspiration of vice‐principals using a quantitative methodology.