Investigating whether there is evidence of toxic leadership impacting on academics’ work engagement in primary education: is there a relationship between Multi-Academy Trusts and higher teacher retention compared to stand-alone schools?

The dissertation and report offer you the opportunity to conduct an original study in educational leadership and/or management under the supervision of a member of staff. The Higher Degrees Board describe a dissertation and report as ‘a single extended piece of writing … will have a single main academic focus, and will contain a substantial fraction of analysis going beyond description’. Both are therefore the same academically and assessed using same academic criteria. For most dissertations and reports an empirical component to your work is expected, meaning that you will gather and analyse data. The data may comprise of surveys, documents, texts or other people’s accounts that you have collected or is available to you. The aims of the dissertation and report study are to give you the chance to develop and show your research skills in:  Proposing a concise researchable question defined within an aspect of educational leadership and management.  Aligning, or contextualising, your research question to educational, social, economic, political OR cultural issue(s) of interest to you by posing an argument to justify the rationale for understanding the issue(s) in relation to educational leadership and management.  Searching academic literature published in journals or textbooks to establish what is already known about the educational leadership and management aspect you are interested in.  Designing a research study and following ethical guidelines to collect information / data from a sample or secondary data or documents.  Ensuring you are assessing the reliability / reproducibility of the information/data you are collecting or using.  Analysing the information / data you have collected, secondary data or documents you have used and clearly organising and presenting the findings.  Critically articulating in writing the significance and limitations of your findings with respect to the educational leadership and management aspect you have studied.