Leading the way to school improvement

I’m involved, now that I have time on my hands, in a project to tell the story of a remarkable educational development programme that involves pairing the principals of struggling schools with business executives in a partnership designed to teach both of them a great deal about leadership under less than perfect circumstances and, at the same time, get the children at the schools that they are at learning.

That, sadly, is not happening at the vast majority of our schools. In fact, the figures say, of the 25 000-odd schools in the country, only 5 000 can be described as functional, and that includes the private schools.

The model I’m describing works, no question. Research is increasingly showing that school leadership is the most important factor in performance of the pupils. Why that is only being found out now is a mystery. In businesses, and other organisations it’s always been recognised that success is dependent on leadership. And millions are spent on developing managers and creating a succession pipeline.

In the education system, largely, that’s not the case. School principals are appointed on the basis of their teaching record, mainly, and given little by way of training or on-the-job support.

The money that is spent on trying to revive dying schools goes mainly into educational materials and equipment (ITC is all the rage these days) and into teacher development, without considering that none of the above will make much difference if the man or woman in the principal’s office is not able to do the job.

All of those other things are necessary, of course, and when the need is there, those who are able to have a responsibility to help out where they can. And the private sector is doing that. In 2016 more than R6 billion was spent by corporate funders on corporate social investment (CSI) projects in schools.

Of course there are success stories. “Saturday schools” supported by corporate funders, for example, are run at a number of top private schools. Matric learners, who aren’t getting enough good teaching at their township schools are bussed in on Saturdays, and during the school holidays, and are taught by the best educators around and they inevitably perform brilliantly in their final examinations.

Who can begrudge giving those brilliant young people the opportunities in life that they might not have gotten but for those intereventions? But, you have to ask, how is this helping the schools they come from?

Partners for Possibility, the project I’m writing about, believes it’s wrong to divorce schooling from the community in this way, and that it would be far more sustainable to capacitate the principal of the struggling school. He should be leading the teachers at the school so that they do the teaching they are being paid to do. Instead of exporting the education of the kids to the fancy schools in the suburbs, the community should take responsibility for the proper raising of its young, the way it was always supposed to do.

The bottom line is that, 25 years since the abolishment of apartheid education, things are actually worse in our schools. The well-meaning interventions are not bringing about any long-term improvements.

It’s an awfully big challenge, but Partners for Possibility has some very clever people working on how it should be tackled and some incredibly powerful school leaders have agreed to become part of the programme in the eight years it’s been running.

Close to 800 principals have been partnered with businesspeople so far, and I have been writing up case studies that would amaze you.

I took on this task for something to do. It’s become way more than that, it’s given me a glimpse of a cutting-edge exercise that may just get us out of our educational hole. 

For more information go to http://www.pfp4sa.org/