Management of the school as an aspect of leadership : implication for whole school development

M.Ed.The history of inequality, fragmentation, illiteracy, neglect and inefficiency in the education system in this country has left us largely with a demise of a culture of teaching and learning. There is therefore an urgent need to transform schools into effective learning organisations. Learners leaving school often do so with a sense of failure and a lack of self-esteem and without sufficient knowledge, understanding and competence to either pursue successful careers or lead fulfilling lives. Some of the blame lies with the learners themselves. The learner leadership often indulges in support of educator politics at the expense of quality curriculum delivery in the classroom. However, a large portion of the blame lies with the poor performance of the educators. They take on numerous roles at school but often lack the capacity to fulfil these roles effectively. As a result, a structured questionnaire was used to probe the relevant perceptions and opinions of educators in seven provinces, after certain assumptions were made and concepts were clarified in chapter one. Chapter two critically revisited the views of collegiality in relation to management of the school in whole school development. The aim of this chapter was also to undertake a literature review of the most recent publications on the school management team and the need for school governance and community involvement in the school governing bodies (SGB's) for whole school development. Chapter three provided a description of the empirical investigation, discussing questions pertaining to the management of the school as an aspect of leadership in whole school development. Most respondents strongly agreed that management of the school needs to be owned by the school and that this should include expertise outside the school. In this chapter, an attempt was also made to outline the methodology the researcher used to collect data. Chapter four provided an analysis and interpretation of the empirical data. Two successive factor analytic procedures reduced the 89 items of the structured questionnaire to three factors namely, accountable collaborative management, school resource management and marketing management. It was shown that some of the various independent groups differed from one another in certain respects. Hypotheses were set and multivariate and univariate statistical tests were used to analyse and interpret the data. The respondents varied in their responses from partially disagreeing to agreeing that effective school management was composed of these three factors. The measuring instrument was shown to be reliable and had content and construct validity and thus could be used to determine the various aspects of school management as determined by factor analysis. In chapter five, a summary of the research is given. Important findings are discussed and recommendations arising from the research are given. The conclusion indicates how the research could be used to possibly solve certain aspects of the problem of transforming school management in South Africa