School Leaders on Safety and Learning Goals

Across education systems, school leaders play a central role in shaping two of the most fundamental dimensions of student outcomes: learning and safety. Students cannot learn effectively in environments where they feel unsafe, and even the best-managed classrooms will fail to reach their potential if teaching and learning are weak. Effective leadership therefore requires not only improving academic performance but also maintaining a positive, safe school culture. Yet, while both are widely recognized as core to school quality, there is limited evidence on how leaders prioritize and act on these responsibilities in practice.

This study examines how secondary school leaders in Uganda navigate these two domains of leadership—student performance and student safety. On student performance, we explore how leaders engage with data from the Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) exams—one of the key sources of performance feedback available to schools. We ask three related questions:

(1) How do school leaders prioritize improvement across high- and low-achieving students and different subjects?
(2) How well do school leaders know the skills of their students?
(3) How well do school leaders understand and use performance data when setting strategies for student achievement? Do exam results provide genuinely new or actionable information?

Turning to school safety, we examine how leaders respond to scenarios of teacher and student misconduct—an equally critical but often less visible dimension of school quality. In particular, we investigate whether the gender of the student victim influences leaders’ perceptions of severity and their proposed disciplinary actions.