This articles covers some key learnings from companies investing in school leadership and interventions, discussed at the Trialogue CSI Forum on School Leadership and Management (2017).
- All education programming (maths and science teaching support for example) could be enhanced by including an element of leadership training.
- Buy-in from teachers, principals and local managers: Zenex recommends ensuring buy-in from district and circuit-level education departments in order to facilitate programme roll-out, as well as ongoing consultation with principals and teachers. By working with circuits, the tools and learnings from your programme may also be applied in schools that are not part of your programme.
- Training does not equal behaviour change. Leaders at all levels (school, circuit, district etc) need to be capacitated within their contexts (not in a faraway class) and supported on an ongoing basis with coaching and mentoring. Zenex suggests a minimum of three years is needed for most education programmes.
- One of the challenges encountered by a number of companies is attrition and the high level of leadership changes. Programmes need to make allowances for this. It also helps to support more than just the principal (school management team, school governing body, circuit leaders etc.), so that when the principal leaves there is still change embedded in the system.
- Identify – in order to hold to account – the individual and the interconnected responsibilities of all role players in education, within government, at school, at home, as well as within the broader community.
- It helps to engage the broader community so that they can make the schools more accountable. For example, NECT has a programme around parental participation. This is often challenging as parents are away at work most of the time and have little time for engagement.
- As with any CSI, it is important to have honest conversations about the school’s primary and urgent needs, versus the ‘nice to haves’, as well as to what extent the company is reasonably able to provide support.
- ‘Communities of practice’ have been found to be very useful in addressing the root causes of, as well as the circumstantial issues impacting, the quality of education. It is however also necessary to look further upstream, to the lack of a formal principal qualification and the need for a more systemic response to poorly skilled school principals and management teams.
- Effective monitoring and evaluation are desperately needed if CSI and other efforts in school leadership are to gain traction in South Africa. Indicators need to be agreed on at the start of a project and a body of knowledge must be developed.
Source: Trialogue CSI Forum on School Leadership and Management, 2017
