Leveraging Secondary School Heads’ State of the School Address (SOSA): A Content Analysis

Abstract

Government schools in the Philippines are headed by school administrators who are generally called School Heads. These school heads carry out the State of the School Address every year to showcase the accomplishment of the school and its future directions. This study analyzed the content and form of the secondary school heads’ written speeches. Stratified random sampling was used to determine the sample size. A qualitative content analysis was conducted to find out the aspect of the SOSA that was given more prominence, the percentage allotted to key messages related to the School-Based Management, the local and global errors made, and the intertextual figures employed in the written speeches. Results showed that school heads gave more prominence to resource management in their SOSA and only 13.46% of the entire SOSA was allotted to key messages related to SBM. They made local errors in morphology, syntax, and lexicon and global errors in idea and organization of information. School heads employed quotation and plagiarism as intertextual figures in their written speeches. The study concluded with the findings that the State of the School Address did not have a clear framework on which to anchor the content of the SOSA. The State of the School Address did not have proper speech guidelines for school heads to follow. School heads needed to enhance their writing proficiency, thus, the adoption of the ideal framework of the SOSA and the implementation of the special writing training program for secondary school heads produced in this study are recommended.