Student Narratives of Academic Success and Struggle: Insights into School Leadership and Policy Enactment in Secondary Schools in Hawassa, Ethiopia

This qualitative narrative study explores how secondary school students in Hawassa, Ethiopia, understand and describe academic success and struggle. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 24 students from four public secondary schools, the study examines the personal, familial, and school-related conditions that students associate with their academic pathways, together with the coping strategies and sources of support they use when facing challenges. The findings indicate that students understand academic success through achievement, progress, confidence, and recognition from teachers, peers, and family members. Academic struggle was associated with food insecurity, poverty, household responsibilities, gendered expectations, resource constraints, and differences in teaching practices. Students responded through combinations of peer collaboration, family encouragement, teacher and school support, spiritual practices, and individual coping strategies. The contrasting school experiences described by students also provide insights into how school-level conditions may shape the ways in which education policies and leadership practices are experienced in everyday school life. The study contributes student-centered evidence to discussions of school leadership, policy enactment, and educational inequality in Ethiopian secondary education while recognizing that student narratives cannot independently establish the effectiveness or causal effects of leadership or policy implementation.