School leadership is widely acknowledged as a critical lever for educational improvement globally. In the Malawian context, however, its specific function within the complex policy architecture linking school governance, district support, and national reform initiatives remains under-theorised and poorly evidenced in policy design. This analysis critically examines the policy mechanisms intended to connect school leadership with systemic improvement in primary education. It aims to deconstruct the assumed causal pathways within current policy and assess their coherence and feasibility given on-the-ground realities. The study employs a qualitative policy analysis framework. It involves a critical document analysis of national education strategy papers, leadership frameworks, and inspection guidelines, triangulated with thematic analysis of interview data from headteachers, school governance committee chairs, and district education officers. The policy framework disproportionately emphasises headteacher accountability for outcomes while providing insufficient authority over key resources or targeted professional development. A dominant theme from stakeholders was the 'responsibility-resource disconnect', with over 80% of interviewed headteachers reporting they lacked meaningful influence over teacher deployment or infrastructure budgets. Current policy creates an untenable position for school leaders by holding them accountable for improvement without empowering them as strategic actors within the governance system. This misalignment fundamentally constrains the potential for leadership-driven change. Policy revision must reconceptualise school leadership as a distributed, system-enabled function. Specific revisions should include devolving genuine budgetary discretion to school level and embedding instructional leadership training within a career-long professional pathway. District offices require restructuring to shift from compliance monitoring to capacity-building support. educational leadership, policy analysis, school improvement, governance, primary education, Malawi This paper provides a novel analysis of the specific policy mechanisms that decouple leadership accountability from authority, offering a critical framework for understanding implementation gaps in low-resource systems.
Mwale et al. (Fri,) studied this question.