Recruiting and Preparing School Principals in Turkey, Germany, France and England

In this study, it is aimed to introduce how the process of recruiting and preparing school managers in some European states and Turkey. Within the scope of the study, it is tried to put forward how school principals are selected and what their preselection criterion are, how their preparation process are handled before they are appointed. The study is done through reviewing the related literature. Considering the criterion of states studied concerning recruiting process of principals, it could be seen that being a teacher is prerequisite for being a principal. When the states in the scope of the study examined in details it might easily be noticed that there are outstanding differences between them in terms of recruiting methods applied by the states. Applying a test examination for selecting principals as in our state is out of question for the other three states. Moreover, the outstanding difference between Turkey and the others is clearly noticed to appear in the preparation process. In Germany, which is one of the states examined in the study, implementations related to the issue might change according to the states in Germany. As for France and England, the essential difference with is the intensive training which the candidate principals have to complete before they are appointed.