Overcoming school management threats
Development opportunities for leaders would improve effectiveness
EFFECTIVE leadership at schools creates an enabling environment for teachers to improve teaching practice and enhances the learners’ ability to learn. A well-run school with a strong focus on instruction (teaching and learning) correlates with better teaching, which means learners have improved competencies in maths and other subject areas. Strong foundations in literacy and numeracy at the early stages of schooling form the basis for good academic performance later in their lives – the best protection young people have against unemployment and low wages.
LeadershipLabSA, in conjunction with Blue Ladder Schools, has conducted extensive diagnostic assessments across the country. It found the three biggest challenges collectively faced by school management teams to be:
Inadequate resources and support to do their work effectively.
Insufficient professional development opportunities to build their leadership capacity.
Training that focuses too heavily on policy without giving practical ways to implement it.
Infrastructure challenges are another serious concern hindering management teams from creating enabling school environments. More than 80% of the assessed schools identified the lack of running water and inadequate sanitation facilities, school building problems as well as drastic under-resourcing for learning materials as major challenges to improving the quality of education.
Other learning challenges were oversubscribed classrooms, under-staffing and high teacher turnover rates, which often contributed to a lack of discipline and order at schools.
Francois Adriaan, head of foundation at Sanlam, said: “Aside from the known education challenges of numeracy and literacy in our schools, we quickly realised there are many other factors that impact the ability for pupils to learn and teachers to lead. Identifying these needs through key partnerships has therefore been a critical process.” Why school leadership training is important Good leadership is the second most important factor in improving school functionality and academic performance; the first is to have good teachers in a classroom who are engaged with learners in a caring relationship and teach rigorous, stimulating lessons that are relevant to the life experiences of the learners.
School leaders need to be empowered to support teachers and create enabling conditions for them to become even better. In addition to stressed and demotivated teachers, here are some of LeadershipLabSA’s other findings and proposed solutions:
Many school principals tend to act as bureaucratic managers. These managers are sometimes autocratic, which is not conducive to improving teaching and learning .
What is required in South Africa is a change in thinking about the role and focus of school leaders. There needs to be a shift nationally whereby principals evolve from being institutional managers to instructional leaders whose main focus is to support and improve teaching and learning at schools.
One possible solution is to provide continuous professional development opportunities for school leaders to develop the skills to create structures and practices to improve school effectiveness and inspire others to work together to achieve their goals. These workshops would complement training provided by the Department of Basic Education and enable school leaders to implement departmental policies more effectively. This also highlights opportunities for public-private partnerships as solutions to the current education crisis.
A concerning "dependency approach" where school management teams sometimes rely too heavily on external assistance from the Department of Education and NGOs, and believe there is very little or nothing they can do on their own to start addressing some of the challenges they encounter.
The primary aim of leadership training is to build agency – defined as the ability of an individual or group to act on a situation and change it – by unlocking the potential in every leader to work with others to solve situations and make changes that benefit the school in the long term.
The focus of change needs to be twofold: external, in terms of policies structures and practices at the school, and internal in terms of changing mindsets, attitudes and behaviours. Both are required for authentic and sustainable change.
Leading a school effectively cannot be done by a single person. It requires distributed leadership and succession plans.
Effective leadership development programmes are often based on the idea that "you don’t have to be in a leadership position to be in a position to lead".
Training needs to enable the formal leadership team to build leadership capacity in others. It’s vital to recognise the leadership potential across the whole school and the greater community and to invite others to become part of shared leadership.
Succession plans are critical: in a complex organisation like a school, there needs to be an ongoing focus on sharing management responsibilities and bringing new people into leadership roles. School leadership development needs to start much earlier.
One of the big problems is that teachers aren’t trained in leadership during the early stages of their qualification and careers. It is essential that this is incorporated into the teacher training curriculum to facilitate better qualified teachers and more effective leaders.
Currently, less than 50% of kids who enrol in Grade 1 make it to Grade 12. And only 6.9% of matric candidates pass maths with over 70%. By providing ongoing training and support to school leaders, we can build agency and assist them to unlock their leadership potential, solve challenges, support teachers and create the learning environments pupils need in order to thrive.
Adriaan at Sanlam says: “Strategic partnerships play a critical role in building sustainable educational solutions, and broadening attributes of school leadership in South Africa is possibly one of the more important focuses. In supporting Blue Ladder Schools, LeadershipLabSA have recognised the importance of leading across a system that includes the school and greater community, and this creates greater impact.”