Abstract
Educational reform in culturally distinctive settings requires management approaches that are responsive to local needs, institutional capacities, and community expectations. Pattani Province, located in Thailand’s southern border region, presents a multicultural educational environment in which schools differ in governance, organizational structure, resources, language, religious identity, and relationships with supervisory agencies. Thailand’s Education Sandbox policy provides participating schools with greater flexibility to develop locally appropriate educational innovations. However, policy flexibility alone is insufficient to improve teaching and learning. Schools still require leaders who can coordinate stakeholders, establish clear educational priorities, support teachers, use evidence for decision-making, and maintain accountability. These requirements are especially important in private Islamic schools, where the roles of licence holders, managers, foundation committees, and school directors may overlap and where access to educational supervision and quality-assurance expertise is often uneven. This study aimed to develop an Area-Based Educational Management (ABEM) Model to strengthen instructional leadership in Pattani Education Sandbox schools. Its specific objectives were to examine existing educational management conditions, identify management and leadership capacities needed by school administrators, develop a context-responsive educational management innovation, and formulate practical and policy recommendations for sustainable school improvement. The study was guided by the view that instructional leadership should not be treated as an isolated set of principal behaviours. Rather, it should be supported by collaborative governance, organisational learning, professional participation, and systematic quality assurance. This view is consistent with evidence that instructional and distributed leadership influence classroom practice through teacher collaboration, professional capacity, and organisational conditions.