The purpose of this paper is to explore the principals' acceptance of School Improvement Partners (SIPartners+) mentoring practice in selected secondary schools in East Malaysia. The case study of four principals in low-performance school was qualitative and interpretive. This paper shows that mentoring practice was still less acceptable by the school principals as they felt that SIPartners+ as an outsider who intervene the school management. The findings dereived from four research questions which related to the needs of mentoring, SIPartners+ competency, SIPartners+ knowledge and SIPartners+ experience. These findings were limited to the sample of principals used for this analysis. Researchers are encouraged to examine SIPartners+ mentoring in other contexts. The results of this research suggested for the practitioners to reflect on their roles in education collaboratively and call for further research on SIPartners+ practices between urban and rural schools. This paper is one of the few documents that studies mentoring in the Malaysian education system. It forms a basis for future empirical research in this area.

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An effective education system needs to be developed and changed to meet current and future claims. As such, in the face of today's challenging global economic challenge, citizens with knowledge, skills and competencies are crucial to the country's success, based on highperformance education. This study aims to determine the predictors of school effectiveness in secondary schools based on the perception of the principals. Data was collected from 246 principals in low-performance schools using the survey questionnaire. The selection of the respondents based on proportionate stratified random sampling. The Structural Equation Modelling analysis showed that the model tested and evaluated was fit. Based on four constructs, namely the appropriateness of change, management support, change of efficacy and personal valence, the variance explained for school effectiveness is approximately 26.3%. The findings indicated that the appropriateness of change and support for management were the main predictors of school effectiveness. The study concluded that the appropriateness of change and management support plays a vital role in the efficiency of schools among principals in low-performance schools. Changes in educational settings need to be adapted to school development to ensure that the school communities successfully adapt changes.