Community involvement in school development: Modifying school improvement concepts to the needs of South African township schools

The article posits a paradigm for school development (SD) in the context of a developing country, which is somewhat different from the dominant SD and school improvement (SI) paradigm in the West. Within this paradigm the norm of a school–parent engagement over pedagogical issues as in the West is replaced by imperatives based on full community involvement in the school on the local community’s own terms. This article uses evidence collected from a case study of 96 schools in Soshanguve township outside Pretoria. The Soshanguve School Development Project (SSDP), a partnership between the local education district office and a non-government organization (Link Community Development), aimed to implement a school development planning process in all the schools in the township. Over the course of the project, the school development approach used led to a novel, highly contextualized response to the needs of the local communities and schools and ultimately to full community participation in most of the schools—and so to real school development within a developing world context