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perceptions and beliefs in their ability to realise goals for improved teaching and learning is
“the key cognitive variable regulating leader functioning in a dynamic environment”
(Leithwood & Jantzi, 2008, p. 497). A sense of efficacy refers to believing in one’s own ability (i.e., self-efficacy) or the collective ability that includes one’s colleagues (i.e., collective efficacy) to achieve goals or accomplish tasks. However, it is a belief about ability, not actual ability. According to Bandura (1997, p. 118):
People make causal contributions to their own functioning through mechanisms of personal agency. Among the mechanisms of agency, none is more central or pervasive than peoples’ beliefs about their capabilities to exercise control over their own level of functioning and over events that affect their lives.
While self-efficacy is important, Louis et al. (2010) claim that system efficacy is the key to district-wide teaching and learning improvement. Hence, educational leaders who “see themselves as working collaboratively towards clear, common goals with district personnel, other principals, and teachers are more confident in their leadership” (Wahlstrom, Louis, Leithwood, & Anderson, 2010, p. 30). District Officials can enhance collective efficacy by providing opportunities for staff to develop expertise that is in line with the district’s goals and creates district organisational structures and settings to support enhanced work in teaching and learning. It is, therefore, crucial that educational leaders develop system efficacy.
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While international literature on district leadership emerges, SA seems to be lagging. As a result, the role that DOs perform to support teaching and learning in schools is elusive and ambiguous. Narsee (2006) posited this as the common and contested meaning of education districts in South Africa, as reflected in the thesis title. Narsee (2006, p. 6) further observed:
The current South African discourse on education districts oscillates confusingly between districts as support centres for schools and districts as administrative and management arms of provincial departments of education. The primary purpose of districts, therefore, remains contentious: do districts exist primarily as a base for professional services to schools or are they established to ensure policy and administrative control.
One of the reasons for the neglect of the district leadership role that emerged in literature and created the vacuum in the development of knowledge is the policy changes landscape (Firestone, 1989; Honig & Rainey, 2015; Narsee, 2006). In the late 1990s, many school development initiatives focused on individual schools. This changed focus on School-Based Management (SBM) as the key to teaching and learning quality (Fleisch, 2006). Anderson (2003, p. 3) posited that lack of attention to the district role in improving teaching and learning became evident “in the heyday of the restructuring era, especially in the context of policies that emphasised decentralisation and SBM as the engine for change.” According to Fleisch (2006), three waves of education improvement initiatives give insight into understanding the role of districts in education are evident in SA. The first wave happened pre–1990 and referred to the small-scale educator-directed initiatives that failed to address system-wide weaknesses. The second wave of initiatives was initiated in the early 1990s with whole-school development programmes that focused on bottom-up development either through building collaborative organisational cultures at a school level or structured processes associated with school development planning. Fleisch (2006) and Christie et al. (2007) observed that these programmes failed to significantly impact teaching and learning and improvements in learner achievement.
A meta-analysis on the impact of SBM on improving teaching and learning outcomes found little evidence that it produces any improvements in the quality of education in the absence of both pressure and support from district and system levels of education (Anderson, 2003;
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Marzano & Waters, 2009). Research on improving and high-performing school districts in the US depicted contemporary district improvement activities partly as a response to fragmentation and lack of coherence in the improvement efforts of quality education (Togneri & Anderson, 2003; Leithwood, 2010). Subsequently, the focus shifted towards the potential role of districts in sustaining school improvement. Hence, the third wave of education improvement initiatives, which focused on the system, commenced (Fleisch, 2006). Further clarifying the focus on district offices, Chinsamy (2013, p. 185) illustrates that by asserting that “the vacuum in the structures necessary to translate policy into practice – may be the primary reason for the failure of transformation in education.” He further states that implementation stands in the district office, which is between the central education department and schools.
Narsee (2006) observed that in SA, schools are likely to experience intervention from the district mainly as pressure more than as support. She elaborated further by suggesting that DOs spend their time mostly “on monitoring and policy compliance activities, rather than school development activities derived from the problems of schools themselves” (Narsee, 2006, p.
178). A study conducted by Mavuso (2013) on two districts in the Eastern Cape Province further corroborated this view. This research found that district-based officials understood and practised their role by focussing on administrative tasks, mainly monitoring policy implementation and resource provision when working with schools. The school management perceived DOs’ visits as focusing on compliance rather than support. Mavuso (2013) also found that schools perceived DOs as working incoherently and sometimes sending different messages to them. Bantwini and Moorosi (2017) study that examined the principals’
perspectives on the district role in supporting schools corroborated this finding. This study's findings showed that principals were dissatisfied with the little support and low visibility of DOs in schools. These authors concluded that the DOs’ nature of support would determine principals and schools' success (Bantwini & Moorosi, 2017). However, according to Taylor (2008, p. 27), district offices do not support the schools because they lack capacity, educational expert authority and are at a “dysfunctional state as the failing schools they purport to administer.”
It is widely documented that school-level leadership is the primary driving force that strengthens and sustains school improvement (Louis et al., 2010). However, for principals to lead effectively, DOs are supposed to provide support as mandated by the national department.
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RSA (2013, p. 11) states that DOs are responsible for working collaboratively with principals by providing “management and professional support.” Nevertheless, existing evidence suggests that DOs are inadequately prepared to offer support to schools (Bantwini & Moorosi, 2017; Mavuso, 2013; Naicker & Mestry, 2015). For example, local studies conducted by Bhengu et al. (2014) and Naicker et al. (2013) on principals’ instructional leadership in challenging contexts found that, among other barriers, a lack of or little support from education officials emerged as a hindrance to schools on curriculum delivery. Some principals in these studies indicated that the departmental officials could not provide professional support because they did not understand their schools’ curriculum needs. The DBE also acknowledged this anomaly in the Annual Performance Plan 2014–2015, that DOs do not provide support when they visit schools (DBE, 2014). Van der Berg et al. (2011) assert that much attention in SA has been on information sharing in a downward direction and that other methods of strengthening schools remain mostly unexplored. This assertion justifies that there is still much to be done in research to understand what DOs do to support schools. Hence, this study attempts to fill this gap in the literature.
Another study by Bantwini (2018) highlighted the perspective of the DOs on the factors that hinder quality basic education in one province in SA. This research found that DOs included teachers' low morale, schools’ lack of confidence in district offices, and the apparent neglect of the lower grades, which are supposed to lay the foundation of learning. Also, Naicker and Mestry (2015) conducted a qualitative study on a system-wide change strategy in school districts in one province of South Africa. This strategy sought to build leadership capacity for principals and DOs and revealed a lack of collaboration between principals and DOs as well as among principals. The study then recommended that PLCs and networks should “speed up system-wide change towards learner performance” (Naicker & Mestry, 2015, p. 1).
There seems to be a general agreement from the above literature that DOs’ lack of support for schools is detrimental to schools' success. This fact further justifies the need for this study to discover what DOs understand to be their role and what they believe to be their leadership practices that support schools. The hope is that this could give insights into why there is an anomaly of DOs not providing support to schools. However, while local literature reiterates the importance of the district office role in supporting schools, it is important to note that it criticises the DOs for failing to exercise the crucial role of supporting schools. The existing
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local literature does not give insights into the DOs’ functions and practices. Hence, this study attempts to address this void in the literature.
In this discussion, it has been emphasised that while districts are acknowledged as an essential level that offers support to schools, the education system in SA is yet to change. Honig (2012, p. 735) posits that district offices were “originally established and have historically operated to carry out a limited range of largely regulatory and basic business functions – not to support teaching and learning improvement.” Rorrer et al. (2008) reported that education improvement policies favoured school-based management, which excluded district offices and entrusted responsibility for learning outcomes to principals and school-level management. According to Honig (2013, p. 1), this resulted in a “mismatch” between the conventional roles of district offices inclined to compliance and the much-needed key role that focuses on teaching and learning. Despite the anomaly that seems to dominate, scholars have recently begun to illustrate practices of district offices that have focused their energies on supporting teaching and learning in schools. The next section details these practices. Even though little research has been conducted in SA on the role of the DOs to support teaching and learning, the literature highlights the need for DOs to develop and support principals, School Management Teams (SMTs) and teachers to enhance learning outcomes.