Educational Leadership and Management as Catalyst for Academic Excellence in South West Nigeria’s Colleges of Education

The study investigated educational leadership and management as catalyst for academic excellence in south-west Nigeria’s colleges of education . To achieve this two questions were raised and two hypotheses were formulated. Also descriptive-survey was adopted. The main population consisted of two hundred and five colleges of education in Nigeria out of it there are forty-seven in South-West Nigeria as at the time of this research, all academic staff, nonacademic staff, principal officers and students from both government and private colleges of education were the target. The sample of the study consisted of eight colleges of education, two each from four state, thirty-five staff  each from the eight colleges of education making two hundred and eighty respondents, i.e 280 staff, using multi-stage, stratified and simple random sampling techniques. The instrument used for data collection was questionnaire
which consisted of 27 items and titled: Educational Leadership and management as catalyst for Academic Excellence in Colleges of Education, in South-West Nigeria. The questionnaire was personally administered on the respondents. Data collected were analyzed using SPSS version 23 and GMWV while hypothesis were tested at 5% level of significance and n-1 degree of freedom to students T-test. The study that: 88.89% of the sampled principal officers of the college of education were male, while 11.11% were female, 50% of the sampled principal officers of the colleges of education were private, while state owned and federal government colleges of education are 25% and 25% respectively. Staff responses on educational leadership
and management, impact on academic performance shows that frequent changes in course syllabus by NCCE affect quality of education in Nigeria were (MWV = 2.23), Provost of colleges of Education do not use autocratic but considerate (MWV = 2.87), the principal officers of the college are more united with both academic and non-academic staff for more effective management (MWV = 2.86), The nature of responsibilities and functions of leaders in colleges of education in south west are not significant.
There is no correlation between the nature of leadership style and management styles practices adopted in colleges of education in south west.
Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that: Frequent changes of course syllabus by NCCE should be discouraged; heads of department should be encourage to aspires for a highly responsive system and the student should be encourage to develop their personal talents and self-development.
If the aforementioned are surely taken care of, there will be a high management as well as administration and leadership competences and styles with corresponding high students’ academic performance in the study area