DIGITAL COMPETENCE OF THE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL AS A MEDIATOR OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CENTRAL DIGITAL COMMUNICATION OF A SECTORAL REFORM
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34132/pard2026.32.11Keywords:
digital competence, school principal, digital communication, mediator of effectiveness, public administration, education reform, digital leadership, public policy implementationAbstract
Purpose: to conceptualise the digital competence of the school principal as a mediator of the effectiveness of central digital communication of a sectoral reform and to build a theoretical model of mediation explaining why digital communication identical in content and volume produces different managerial effects across educational institutions. Material and methods: the study is theoretical and relies on critical conceptual analysis, conceptual modelling, conceptual triangulation, and comparative analysis of scholarly sources. Its evidentiary base comprises international digital competence frameworks (DigCompEdu), studies of digital leadership of school leaders, M. Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy concept, W. Cohen and D. Levinthal’s absorptive capacity theory, and contemporary frameworks of digital governance. Results: a distinction is substantiated between the direct and the mediated effect of the principal’s digital competence on reform implementation; a four-component structure of the principal’s digital mediation competence is proposed (receptive, verification, translation, and navigational components); a theoretical model of mediation is constructed in which the principal’s competence appears not as an input condition but as a moderator of the strength of the link between the quality of central digital communication and local managerial action; a four-level scale of the principal’s digital mediation maturity and a system of theoretical indicators are proposed. Conclusions: the principal’s digital competence is a distinct mediating subject of public communication theory rather than a secondary technical skill; ignoring this mediator leads to systematic overestimation of the effectiveness of central digital communication and to hidden communication inequality between institutions during reform scaling; the prospect lies in empirical operationalisation of the proposed indicators.
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