Discourses of leadership and management
7.2 The case of the Post-Provisioning Norm (PPN)
In South Africa, a New Post Provisioning (PPN) model, encapsulated in the Government Notice number 1451, Gazette number 24077 of 15 November 2002, has been utilised to distribute posts to schools. To accommodate the new subjects in the national curriculum statements, the Department of Education (DoE) has provided interim subject weighting norms, for subjects (see Annexure C- the PPN for Primrose Secondary). The model distributes posts in accordance with the following relative needs and priorities of institutions:
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o Educational and organisational requirements according to class size;
o Whether or not more than one medium of instruction is used;
o The number of grades provided by the school;
o Poverty index (DoE, 2002).
As the PPN is legislated, it is expected that schools and the provincial DoE comply with this legislation. A number of discourses emerged in the case of the PPN (administrative rationality, market driven discourse, rationalisation discourse). The establishment of the PPN has been driven by the discourse of administrative rationality. Administrative rationality is output and efficiency driven. It assumes that human beings will be more productive in the work environment if they are managed and controlled in a manner that is required to secure the optimum output for the organisation. Ball has found “that educators are increasingly subjected to systems of administrative rationality that exclude them from an effective say in the kind of substantive decision-making that could equally well be determined collectively” (Ball, 1988, p. 153).
The PPN dictates the number of personnel needed for an establishment. At the level of implementation, a PPN signifies that certain educators may need to be relocated to another institution if they are in excess to the current institution’s requirements. In 2008, the PPN for the number of posts in the majority of schools was reduced and this had a demoralising effect on many educators who were forced to shoulder increased workloads and to teach in overcrowded classrooms. The weightings of this PPN varied between subjects, for example, Accounting is weighted at 0,179 and Mechanical Technology at 0,462 (see Annexure C). This influences the number of educators allocated to teach these subjects. Schools were expected to work rigidly within the specified norms and apply the policy directives to the letter of the law. Emotions ran high during this period, resulting in high levels of stress in administrating policy directives. The principal made such a point at a staff meeting:
We normally have very bad news for staff where we say ‘you’ and ‘you’ must go. We sit here and play God. It’s like a day of judgement. Somebody will say ‘I can teach your subject: Life orientation.’ Last in, first out. Then you get the likes of ...going through some trauma. And then you get the union visiting in the office. ‘We declared a dispute, Mr …, we want to see you (principal in a staff meeting).
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An emotionally charged activity is treated cautiously by the principal and the SMT. The principal is not unaware of the trauma. The extract reveals a subtle warning and implies that the SMT have the power, educators don’t, and to think of challenging the PPN process would create more hassles. Educators are positioned as objects of the discourse of administrative rationality. Both the SMT and educators are pawns in the process. An educator could be employed at the school for 20 years, given years of service to the school and community and be told in a process that usually takes a few days that she/he is no longer required at the school (you and you must go). The principal recognises the trauma this creates and indicates that he is powerless to intervene. Yet, this is a highly subjective process with micro-politics in the school playing a contributory role in terms of who is excess to the organisation’s requirements. Educators affected have recourse to a union which is not perceived favourably by the principal as the process becomes put under scrutiny. The discourse of administrative rationality plays in the same space as the rights discourse. The ultimate outcome of the process would be, not to increase the PPN, but to determine who would be the next victim of the rationalisation process if the process was incorrectly applied. This implies that all staff members are at risk and at the mercy of the process.
The process is named as rationalisation and results in displacement, relocation or loss of position for the educator. Rationalisation is tied to the interests of the state to cut the costs of funding schools. With the amalgamation of South Africa’s schools under one department of education in 1994, there has since been a tendency of the state to cut costs by adopting market principles. A market-driven discourse pervades the school system. Bush (2003, p. 2) argues that a “focus on official authority leads to a view of institutional management which is essentially top down.
Policy is laid down by senior managers”, generally at the national level and implemented by the staff lower down the hierarchy. The principal is positioned as the custodian for the implementation of policy. The official policy discourse is re-interpreted at local school level. Tensions emerge when the PPN is calculated incorrectly, as is revealed in a diary entry of SMT member D below:
Management meeting- urgent issue of PPN 2007- principal presented a new reduced PPN of 35. Management to scrutinise the document to check for omissions, incorrect calculations etc.
with a view to secure a more favourable PPN. Our department affected directly since additional post was to be given to ... D..tasked to oversee process together with M... It is sad that the Department keeps on oscillating on an important aspect like post provisioning.
Experts should be retrained annually to authenticate process of the PPN before release (diary entry SMT member D).
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The extract is an example where the PPN is reduced further. After going through a process of determining who would be in excess to the establishment’s requirements, the process starts again, without consideration of how the emotions and lives of staff are affected. The transformative agenda of the DoE to re-distribute skills does not achieve its desired objrective. The process to achieve this is through a de-humanising process. In the area of the PPN, a number of discourses circulate for different purposes creating contradictory outcomes. Thus, oppositional discourses can be found to circulate in the same space.
Generally, a dispute would arise out of different ways of applying the policy directive, rather than the policy per se. Ball (1988,p.126) makes the point that “concepts like efficiency are treated as though they are neutral and technical matters, rather than being tied to particular interests. The question of ‘efficiency for whom’ is rarely asked. Efficiency itself is taken as self-evidently a good thing”. In the case of the PPN, efficiency comes at a cost: the educator to learner ratio is increased for purposes of rationalisation of positions and funding; and there is a shift from specialist towards generalist offerings for an educator. The offer of some subjects that few learners opt to take (for example, technical electronics) implies that a specialist teacher in this subject has to be retained at the school. For him/her to have a full teaching load would require other subjects be given to him/her resulting in another teacher who would have served a greater number of years being rationalised or displaced. This contradicts the teacher-training approaches in the South African education system where specialisation is fostered. The educator here is positioned as a generalist educator through the discourse of administrative rationality.
A policy directive such as the PPN from the DoE is typical of a formal model of leadership where the focus is “on the organisation as an entity and the contribution of individuals are under- estimated or ignored. Formal models assume that people occupy pre-ordained positions in the structure and that their behaviour reflects their organisational positions rather than their individual qualities and experience” (Bush, 2003, p. 3). This de-humanising characteristic of administrative rationality is exemplified in the extracts above.
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The reduction in the number of teaching staff in accordance with the PPN of the institution shifts education management from bureaucratic to entrepreneurial management. In Primrose Secondary School, in order to reduce the educator-pupil ratio, four governing body-paid educators were appointed in 2007. In the extract below, a scenario is painted by an educator that highlights the difficulty that a school is placed in because of the PPN:
An outsider comes and says that I am giving you R100 000 to employ governing body educators to make the workload less in the school…..because I know of the suffering we go through- sometimes when I sleep at night I think about it….it will make the life of the educator pleasant (male educator at car park duty point).
Governing body educators are generally unqualified, or underqualified, some fresh out of school.
Therefore, the purpose of improving the quality of education through reduction in the teacher- pupil ratio may not be achieved. The PPN necessitated the running of schools as enterprises with clients (learners and parents), stakeholders (SGB, department officials), and other business processes such as collection of fees and payment of utility bills. Bloch (2009) presents an alternative characteristic of the discourse of administrative rationality given the current dysfunctionality of the majority of South African schools. He argues that educators need administrative efficiency and the ordered predictability of a well-run school in order to achieve success in the teaching and learning processes. This reinforces Ball’s (1998) point made earlier that concepts like efficiency are treated as neutral and technical. In the case of the PPN, the intention of this objectivity is tied to the interests of state to reduce funding to schools.