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Record W4413418916 · doi:10.1177/14752409251366803

Survival at the top: Factors impacting tenure and reasons for departure of the international school head

2025· article· en· W4413418916 on OpenAlex
Allan R Morrison

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Research in International Education · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGlobal Education and Multiculturalism
Canadian institutionsInstitute for Christian StudiesUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSalaryInternational educationEducational leadershipPosition (finance)International schoolGlobePolitical scienceFace (sociological concept)Corporate governancePublic relationsSociologyHigher educationPedagogyPsychologyBusinessManagementSocial scienceEconomicsLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The international school market has grown significantly over the past two decades. This has provided tremendous opportunities for school leaders to take on leadership positions around the globe. Existing literature notes short tenure in many cases, suggesting that many international school heads may not have developed the requisite skills to successfully lead an international school. However, significant gaps in the literature exist, most notably current data on tenure and reasons for leaving the position. To address these gaps, this study, through a mixed methods design, examines the current length of tenure of international school heads and issues impacting tenure. A total of 177 international school heads completed a survey and 9 in-depth interviews with heads of school were conducted. Results from both the quantitative and qualitative components indicate that while tenure is now higher than the average of 4.8 years reported in a previous study conducted over a decade ago, heads of school face many of the same issues. The top three reasons noted for head turnover reflected issues related to i) governance, ii) salary and career considerations, and iii) family and personal issues. This study offers recommendations for current and aspiring international heads of international schools in addressing important structural challenges which may impact their ability to remain in post.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.329
Threshold uncertainty score0.996

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.115
GPT teacher head0.538
Teacher spread0.423 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it