21st Century Principal Leadership in Higher Education: Challenges and Preparedness

Education in the 21st century is rapidly progressing into new frontiers Leadership of the education sector requires 21st century skills and mind-sets. Building and preparing principals to embrace and implement these new leadership skills is a critical challenge confronting the education sector today. Despite deliberating on 21st century leadership skills for almost twenty years, and still, principals might try to operate by the book, manage their leadership to keep the status quo by implementing some best practices instead of leading with confidence and real expertise that the 21st century looks for. Given the nature of the challenges facing the 21st century leadership in higher education in India, the constraints and the lacuna that is experienced by it, need to be unearthed, reflected and made sense that educational leadership may galvanize itself to keep momentum with the current developments. India has a multi-layered consultation process involving many stakeholders in the education sector to discuss and implement measures to improve the quality of education, known as the National Education Policy. (NEP). One area that the NEP addresses but has not yet fully addressed is the role of school leaders in the redesigned education system. This paper attempts to look at the Principal's leadership in the higher education scenario through four main themes; Leadership: Challenging Factors; Skills and competency factors; Practice factors and context factors. It also addresses these factors, which underpin the need for school leaders to guide the 21st century. It also proposes a framework for 21st century leadership skills and practices for school leaders.