Financial stewardship as a foundational dimension of educational leadership: a hierarchical framework for equity in under-resourced schools

Purpose This study positions financial stewardship as a foundational dimension of educational leadership, arguing that effective financial management is not a peripheral administrative task but a primary driver of leadership efficiency and educational equity in under-resourced schools. The research develops a hierarchical framework showing how sound fiscal stewardship enables coherent supervision, participatory management, program-centric planning and ultimately, improvements in teaching and learning quality. Design/methodology/approach A sequential mixed-methods design integrated qualitative coding of expert interviews with quantitative validation using the fuzzy Delphi method and interpretive structural modeling (ISM), complemented by MICMAC analysis. Methodological integration was ensured through the SSIM and reachability matrices, with inter-rater reliability achieving a Kappa coefficient of 0.74. Findings The 12-level ISM model placed financial stewardship at the foundational level, revealing its cascading influence on managerial, instructional and ethical domains. Comparative insights from the secondary literature on Iran, India and South Africa confirmed that contextualized financial leadership mitigates inequity and promotes sustainable improvement. Research limitations/implications As with any modeling study, this research has limitations. The ISM–FDM approach reflects expert consensus but may be limited to comparable sociocultural contexts. Future studies should include broader and longitudinal datasets to test causal stability. The cross-sectional design constrains temporal validation and student-level outcomes were not examined. Despite these limits, the framework remains a scalable tool for policy evaluation and comparative research, translating the abstract notion of leadership for equity into an operational model linking financial stewardship with learning outcomes. Practical implications The hierarchical model provides actionable guidance for sustaining educational quality in low-resource contexts. Its core principle – finance first, governance second and instruction last – emphasizes that instructional excellence depends on fiscal integrity. Policymakers should embed financial leadership, transparency and budgeting ethics into principal preparation and certification programs. At the institutional level, the model serves as a diagnostic tool linking fiscal responsibility, trust, participation and learning engagement. It also encourages integrating financial metrics into leadership evaluation systems, bridging moral purpose with managerial practice and positioning financial stewardship as both a prerequisite for and an expression of educational equity. Originality/value Departing from conventional leadership models that view finance as a constraint, this study reframes it as a strategic capability that enables equity-oriented, resilient educational systems.