Digital competence and school leadership in Greece

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is the assessment of principals in special secondary education schools for students with special educational needs digital competence (SEN) in Greece. In addition, the main goal was to highlight digital competence principals that offer in their administrative issues. In order to collect relevant to the purposes of this research data, the quantitative method based on survey and questionnaire was mainly used. The quantification was effectuated with the use of the Statistical Program SPSS suitable for descriptive and correlation analyses of collected of data. The use of descriptive statistics allows the presentation of the demographic data of the research as well as gives the trend that is resulted from the answers of the research questions that were asked. Additionally, the reference to the methods of inductive statistics was applied. These methods are focused on the possibility to rely on findings from a sample of observations. The inductive statistics evaluates the questionnaire confidence. The descriptive statistics described the main characteristics of individual variables. For these reasons, the questionnaire was distributed to a great number of principals of special secondary education schools of all regions of Greece. In consequence of Covid-19 and geographical distance, the questionnaire was effectuated online via Google forms. From the 198 principals that obtained the questionnaire, only 174 principals sent back the answer. The results demonstrated that the digital competence significantly contributes to the principals’ administrative management. The digital competence helps saving the time and reducing the volume of documents ensuring their easy access to the digital world. It is important to evaluate the principals’ digital competence and its impact on their administrative tasks in Greece in order to enrich the scientific research in Greece concerning the crucial topic and its impact on the educational community.