School Structure as an Institutional Determinant of Strategic Plan Implementation in Public Secondary Schools in Kenya

The study sought to investigate the influence of school structure on the strategic plan implementation. The study used of a descriptive survey research design. The study targeted 351 public secondary schools, 351 public School principals, 1,404 class teachers, and 1,755 academic Heads of Departments from which the sample of 105 principals, 176 academic Ho Ds and 140 class teachers was derived. The respondents were sampled using stratified sampling technique. A questionnaire and an interview guide were the data collection instruments. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze data. Data was presented by use of frequency distribution tables and pie charts. Person’s product moment correlation coefficient and multiple linear regression was used to analyze the inferential data. The set level of hypothesis testing was at 0.05 level of significance. This study may be significant to the school board of management members and policy makers in terms of know how skills on formulation, implementation and evaluation of strategic plan implementation in schools. This study found that school structure in school development plan has a positive and significant influence on the strategic implementation in schools. Based on these findings, the study recommended that there is need for the schools to have forums to evaluate achievement of the goals and objectives in strategic plan. The researcher conducted Hypothesis testing using a multiple regression model at the 5 percent level of significance. The results of hypothesis testing gave a positive coefficient of 0.0470 on school structure results with a p-value of 0.314 and not statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Hence we fail to reject the hypothesis that, school structure has no effect on strategic plan implementation. This indicates that, school structure does not have a statistically significant effect on strategic plan implementation in public secondary schools in Machakos County.