Inclusive Leadership? The View of Families towards the Practices of School Principals

Abstract

Attention to diversity is one of the greatest challenges in education today, and school management and leadership is a key axis. In this paper we want to deepen, from the perspective of families, on how they perceive management practices from the perspective of school inclusion. For this purpose, we applied the LEI-Q questionnaire "Leading inclusive education in compulsory education centers"- Family validated by López-López et al. (2021), to a representative sample of families from 4 Andalusian provinces (Spain) within a broader project. The analyses performed were descriptive and inferential statistical analyses. The main results point to the fact that school leaders, in general, implement inclusive actions, although they still need to improve their performance, from the families' perceptions. It seems that the perceptions regarding the actions of openness to the community and the consideration of the centers as inclusive spaces vary according to the ownership of the centers and the socioeconomic level of the areas. This offers us a vision of the reality of schools that we must continue to work on.