Principals’ Supervision Competency and the Management of School Resources in Public Secondary Schools in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya

Almost all empirical work on principals’ supervision concerns the supervision of instruction; whether the capacity to monitor and hold to standard reaches the resources on which instruction depends has scarcely been examined. This article estimates the influence of principals’ supervision competency on the management of school resources in public secondary schools in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya, and tests the null hypothesis of no significant influence. Guided by the Management Competency Framework of Quinn et al. (1996), from whose monitor and producer roles supervision is derived, the study used a convergent parallel mixed methods design combining a crosssectional survey with a qualitative descriptive strand. Stratified, simple random, convenience and purposive sampling produced a planned sample of 289 from 49 of the county’s 166 public secondary schools. Two hundred and three teacher questionnaires were usable (86.4%); the 48 principal questionnaires failed data screening and were excluded, so all inferential findings represent teachers’ assessments. Thirty-nine interviews and six observation checklists were completed. Supervision competency (M = 3.39, SD = 1.13) was positively associated with the management of school resources, r(200) =.812, p <.001, accounting for 65.9% of the variance, F(1, 200) = 387.04, and the null hypothesis was rejected. The association was strong with human (r =.830), financial (r =.829) and infrastructural (r =.719) resources and weak with material resources (r =.377), and supervision retained an independent association with the two physical domains when the co-measured competencies were controlled. Supervision was exercised more effectively in securing conformity to goals (M = 3.85) than in building professional capability (M = 3.10), and facilities subject to external inspection were adequate in all six schools observed while those dependent on internal supervisory attention were not. Being cross-sectional, the study establishes association rather than causation. It recommends quarterly financial reporting to Boards of Management, documented delegation with retained oversight, termly facilities inspection, current asset registers, and training directed at developmental rather than compliance supervision. Keywords: Supervision Competency; Management of School Resources; Principals’ competencies; School Infrastructure Maintenance