Paper Details

Name: Navinder Kaur Ruprai & Manpreet Kaur
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Volume No: 13, Issue No: 1, Year: 2026
Page Number: 200-211
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20372917

ABSTRACT
Strategic leadership has emerged as a pivotal determinant of the successful implementation of India's National Education Policy 2020 in K-12 school settings. While the policy articulates a transformative vision for Indian education, the academic understanding of how school leaders perceive, experience, and navigate this mandate remains empirically limited. This study adopted a qualitative approach- grounded in in-depth interviews and thematic analysis- to explore educators' perceptions of the role of strategic leadership in NEP implementation across K-12 schools in North India. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with school principals, academic coordinators, and experienced teachers, the study surfaces three interconnected themes: leadership as a catalyst for pedagogical transformation, distributed responsibility as a structural necessity for reform, and contextual constraints as persistent mediators of leadership effectiveness. The study further identified and maps existing research gaps in the literature on educational leadership and NEP implementation, including the absence of empirically validated India-specific leadership frameworks, limited scholarly attention to vocational education leadership, and the near-absence of research on AIintegrated leadership practices in school reform contexts. The findings contributed to both the
theoretical literature on educational leadership and the practical discourse on building school leadership capacity for large-scale policy reform in India.

Keywords: [Strategic Leadership, NEP 2020, Qualitative Research, Thematic Analysis, K-12
Education, Educational Reform, Academic Perceptions]