Good school governance is basically about effective principal leadership used to create appropriate processes, systems, and management for ensuring the sustainability and continuity of schools. This research aims to examine the model of good school governance and to establish the correlation between good school governance and the principal’s decision-making in vocational school contexts. The samples of the present quantitative descriptive study were the vocational school principals, headmasters, and teachers by considering the representation of all states. The factor analysis was applied to bring out the latent variables representing the attributes, and later, the causality between these variables was established using structural equation modelling (SEM). Structural equation modelling (SEM) is a collection of statistical methods for modelling the multivariate relationship between variables. It is also covariance structure analysis or simultaneous equation modelling and is often considered an integration of regression and factor analysis.
The confirmatory factor analysis has shown that good school governance was constructed by six principles namely transparency, accountability, responsibility, autonomy, fairness, and participation. Empirically, the good school governance has impacted positively on the quality of the principal’s decision-making. The research has affirmed that good school governance facilitates the participation of teachers and educational staff in the decision-making process. Furthermore, the good school governance improves the decision-making quality through the empowerment of teachers, the delegation of authority, and the encouragement of shared decision-making.
The good governance indicators are applicable in education and can be adapted to assess the public services governance. The principles of good school governance generally refer to The United Nations Development Program (UNDP “Governance and Sustainable Human Development”). The present research adopts a set of principles namely transparency, accountability, responsibility, autonomy, fairness, and participation.
Transparency: Transparency is built to serve easy access on processes, institutions, and information. Basically, the educational provision can be improved through better management practices, transparency in resource use, and accountability to all stakeholders.
Accountability: Accountability is linked to management and concepts of participation, decentralization, empowerment, and transparency. The demands of both democracy and efficiency require some form of accountability at schools in which the political power of the leaders covers three ways namely enforcement, monitoring, and answerability. The accountability differs depending on the organization and whether the decision is internal or external. However, the principals should monitor and provide information to control teachers and hold them accountable Thus, the decision-makers at schools; either private schools or public schools should be accountable to the public and institutional stakeholders.
Responsibility: Responsibility refers to the organization’s ability to control the running of rules or procedures. The schools must make sure that the policy made is responded well by those in charge of.
Autonomy: The shifting authority system to the decentralization system affects the decision-making processes and increases the school autonomy. Consequently, some changes create a new environment at schools. However, schools autonomy and participatory governance would be significant for schools improvement. The schools turn into independence in which the schools are managed professionally according to their respective functions and roles without any pressure.
Fairness: Fairness is promoted through equity principle. The rule of law where laws should be fair and enforced impartially to all. Fairness points to equal treatment in fulfilling stakeholder rights based on the agreements and regulations. In daily interaction, for instance, school policies do not discriminate among schools members at school.
Participation: Participation is proved to improve the quality of education and the governance of educational institutions. A research demonstrates the positive relationship among participation, education quality and governance. All stakeholders have roles in making decisions, either directly or through representation. Moreover, participation is also closely related to the interaction of educational stakeholders, the community, the business world, and the government.
Principal’s Decision Making: The school principals have a prominent responsibility in ensuring all school programs run effectively. They are mostly elected from either the administrator or the instructional leader. The principals work collaboratively with the other school stakeholders to develop and implement the school plans in finances, teaching and services, internal processes, and development of the organization. This means that they should enable to interpret messages, approaches, and contexts within their school environments and make decisions. In other words, the school principals become the prominent school stakeholder in achieving the success of the school performance which is mainly determined by the student academic outcomes and teacher career satisfaction .Some methods are offered in supporting the school’s outstanding performance. Rationally, the school success lays on the school principals since the principal’s attitude significantly influences effective and efficient management in educational institutions. This means that the school principals become the dominant stakeholder who is responsible in ensuring the school performance. The expert opinion might help in solving poorly structured problems in the management of educational institutions.
Furthermore, a tool simulation is set to recognize and reproduce decision-making experiences in a problem-based learning approach. The decision-making process forces the principals to find various solutions. Those are often highly significant in addressing the needs and demands of the stakeholders such as the teaching and learning materials, time allocation, and assessment, schedule, and budgeting. Often, the decisions are about the appropriateness of educational programs adapted to the school. Thus, the successful principals are those who respond most appropriately towards the problems and situations occurred through decision-making process. Besides, data-informed decision-making system is also noteworthy for increasing the role of principals in school effectiveness. The decision support system significantly affects the quality of the principal’s decision-making.
The information system allows the school principals to recognize powers, fears, limitation, and strategies in decision-making process for implementing good governance policies for schools. The easy information accessibility is now crucial as in the process of decision-making, it is required active involvement of all stakeholders, namely parents, teachers, students and educational staff. However, practically, the participative decision-making among school principals, teachers, and parents has been challenging to achieve due to the very limited proportion. The process of the decision-making is started from identifying a problem, setting a solution approach, testing the idea, and sometimes recognizing a new problem during the testing.
