Digital Leadership and ICT Utilisation in Public Basic School Administration in Ghana: Headteachers’ Experiences and Implementation Realities

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine how public basic school headteachers in Ghana experience and interpret ICT utilisation in their administrative work. Although policy increasingly requires digital communication, record-keeping, reporting and accountability, school-level conditions remain uneven. Guided by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), the study employed an interpretivist qualitative case study design. Semi-structured interviews with twelve headteachers in the Effutu Municipality were analysed thematically, with TAM and UTAUT constructs used to interpret differences in confidence, independent use and institutional support. Headteachers regarded ICT as necessary for communication, documentation, report preparation and information retrieval, but benefits were uneven. Confident users worked more independently, whereas others relied on digitally skilled colleagues. Limited infrastructure, practical training, technical support and funding constrained sustained use. The study concludes that positive attitudes alone cannot produce effective administrative digitalisation when facilitating conditions remain weak. It recommends pairing digital reporting requirements with task-based training, basic infrastructure, responsive technical support and clear school-level data-protection procedures. This study is significant because it shifts attention from classroom integration to the administrative realities of digital leadership in basic schools.