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hat all action processes must be monitored by the principal or an assistant to ensure that there is a proper use of time, resources and helping to acquire a clear sense of direction.

According to the Maltese Education Act 327 the head of school is responsible to create a collaborative environment in which a school development plan can be designed and revised. Hopkins and MacGilchrist (1998, p411) suggest that a self school-audit should be running through the whole time frame of the SDP and not only at the end of it.
Investigation

The Place of the Investigation

School X is a pseudo name used for confidentiality of the school investigated. It is managed by a Principal and two assistants. There are thirty-four teachers and seven learning support assistants. Some of them have been there for ages while others are still fresh. The students are all girls aged between eleven and fifteen years separated in fifteen mixed ability classes.

Designing Research

The focal point of this study was basically the process of development planning in schools. Through this investigation the involvement of the teaching staff in the development planning process together with the ownership of the document itself was investigated. Developing research questions is a starting point in research. Punch (2009, p5) describes it as “a goal of the pre-empirical stage of the research.”

From the literature review it was discovered that many researchers consider development planning as an important step for school improvement (Hopkins and MacGilchrist, 1998, p409). This assignment investigates to what extent does the development planning process helps school improvement. The term ‘collegiality’ was an examined concept with regards to SDP. Not all schools involved everyone in the planning. Through the questionnaire in School X it was examined to what extent does collegiality helps in school development planning. From the readings about teaching staff’s involvement in the SDP the following research question arose: how far is the staff involved in the development planning. After investigating this, the next question was to examine the extent to which the teaching staff owns the school development plan. The aim of this assignment is to answer these questions.

Choosing the Sample

Choosing the sample from a small number of teaching staff was not an easy task. Cohen et al says that it is an important stage in the process of research to define a representative sample of the whole population (2000, p93). Representative sample are important for the reliability of a questionnaire as it leads to more accurate results (Cohen et al, p117). Not to be a biased investigation, selective sampling was avoided through random sampling and everyone had the same chance to be selected. “In simple random sampling, each member of the population under study has an equal chance of being selected” (Cohen et al, 2000, p100). The issue of consent in choosing the sample was avoided since all those involved were adults. Comparing the pilot study results with the actual investigation results was a reassurance that the sample was a representative one.

methodology

Before choosing the research tool for an assignment one has to choose between a quantitative or qualitative outcome results (Pu