The Perspective of Bulgarian School Principals On The Factors Hindering Digitization In School Organizations

This paper focuses on the opportunities that SELFIE, as a tool, provides for a multifaceted reflection on the conditions and barriers to achieving digital maturity in school organizations. It presents initial findings on the factors that limit the developmental capacity of primary and secondary schools in the Bulgarian context from the perspective of school principals. The results, obtained from a representative sample of school leaders (n = 349), allow for several conclusions regarding the research problem. First, notable and, to a large extent, contradictory trends emerge in the responses of school principals when they assess the barrier factors to digitalization. A contrast is observed between their evaluations of these factors as general determinants that hinder digital transformation and their assessments of similar indicators when framed as “achieved conditions for digitalization” within their own schools (i.e., in a more positive evaluative context). Second, within the ranking procedure of eight predefined indicators in the SELFIE subscale “Factors hindering digitalization,” school principals identified three aspects as having the strongest restrictive impact on the integration of digital technologies: (1) insufficient school funding, (2) inadequate digital equipment/infrastructure, and (3) teacher workload (lack of time). Third, an exploratory factor analysis of the SELFIE subscale focusing on barriers to digitalization revealed a three-factor latent structure. The most prominent subdomain, explaining 28.5% of the variance in the principals' responses, was identified as "financial-technological constraints/barriers." The findings provide important methodological insights into the use of self-assessment and quantitatively oriented tools such as SELFIE when measuring complex constructs like the "digital maturity" of schools. Additionally, these results could serve as valuable guidance for school leaders and policymakers in the education sector, helping them seek more sustainable and strategically effective solutions for addressing digitalization barriers by contextualizing them within specific educational organizations.