School Governance is a critical feature of effective schools, and the majority of School Governing Bodies (SGB’s) in South Africa are dysfunctional. Provincial education departments (PEDs) play a crucial role in school governance, yet they are plagued by insufficient capacity, limited capability, and weak accountability. These issues restrict their ability to support and regulate SGBs effectively. Strengthening provincial education departments is essential for improving governance, and ultimately ensuring that all South African public schools can provide high-quality education to our learners. To address these challenges, we need to draft policies that are responsive to current challenges and constraints, reform the qualification criteria for senior official appointments and introduce independent accountability mechanisms to monitor provincial performance.
62% of SGBs were found to be “minimally effective” by the 2017 School Monitoring survey. They are plagued by corruption and fraud, limited technical capacity and undue union influence on staff appointment processes – all of which undermine school and system efficacy.
The BELA bill aims to strengthen governance by centralising key governance functions in Heads of Department (HODs). This is unlikely to address the issue, as one could propose that it is the lack of stringent provincial oversight and robust support mechanisms that allow such malpractices to flourish in SGBs in the first place. If we’re going to strengthen governance, we have to strengthen PEDs, not just parents and senior management teams.
The South African Schools Act (SASA) outlines the roles and responsibilities of the state regarding SGBs, emphasizing the collaborative relationship between PEDs and SGBs. Among others, PEDs hold the following responsibilities:
Circuit Managers (CMs) are the pivotal link between PEDs and schools, and Heads of Department (HODs) rely heavily on them to support and challenge SGBs. We simply cannot improve school governance without understanding and addressing some of the challenges facing Circuit Managers.
For administrative purposes, provinces are divided into districts and circuits, with districts containing 5 to 10 circuits, and circuits containing 15-30 schools. These are looked after by CMs – their office’s functions include “providing a channel of communication, management support and administrative services from the district office to education institutions, facilitating training for Principals, Management teams and SGB’s, monitoring the functionality of education institutions and providing curriculum support to Grade R practitioners and primary grade teachers.”
In provinces like the Eastern Cape and KZN a single Circuit Manager can be responsible for more than 50 schools, and is expected to support them without a local office, car, printer or secretary. The Namakwa District in the Northern Cape has 79 schools across 6 circuits over 126,836 km2. CMs across the majority of the country are confronted daily with the overwhelming and impossible choice of either visiting and supporting schools, or staying on top of their administrative duties. It should come as no surprise that the combined effect of a demanding role with little support results in limited impact.
South Africa is a graveyard littered with perfect policies poorly implemented. But is a policy really perfect if it does not consider context, budget or capacity? The district and circuit delineation Policy needs urgent reform to cater to urban migration, rural school rationalisation, and fiscal constraints. It also has to be supported by rigorous budgeting and planning.
Minimum requirements for CMs are 3 years teaching and 4 years Principal experience, while Principal’s need only a matric pass and a teaching degree.
Note that the ONLY qualification required to supervise and support anywhere between 25 and 50 schools is a teaching degree. This is highly problematic for at least two reasons. Firstly, nothing in a teaching degree prepares or qualifies someone to manage a school, let alone 50. Secondly, the admissions criteria for a teaching degree are among the lowest at all leading South African Universities.
The current requirements are simply too low, and standards need to be raised if we are to see more competent officials in post. We need to introduce and mandate professional qualifications for Circuit Managers. Furthermore, to ensure these improved standards take effect, recruitment and appointment processes need to be strengthened as well. This must be done through the introduction of competency based assessments carried out by independent assessment centres.
The appointment criteria are not just abysmally low, they are also wide open to exploitation. A task team appointed by Angie Motshekga in 2016 to investigate corruption in the system found that “cadre deployment in education allows corruption and appoints unqualified individuals, weakening the system”.
This finding highlights the third and potentially most fundamental failing of the system – a distinct lack of accountability. A Centre for Development and Enterprise report highlights broken accountability chains where the DBE cannot hold PEDs accountable, Districts struggle with principals, and principals with teachers. It also found that communities lack information to hold schools accountable.
Further weakening this already loose chain of accountability, is the fact that the majority of officials at every layer of the system belong to the same union – thereby creating a tremendous conflict of interest in managing performance, negotiating wage increases and processing appointments.
This lack of accountability unequivocally weakens school governance and contributes significantly to the waste and systemic underperformance we see across the entire education system.
To stop the rot, the entire system requires radical accountability reform. To start with, managers need to play a greater role in appointing their direct reports. By revising recruitment and appointment processes for CMs, Principals and teachers, reporting lines could be strengthened. A further fundamental requirement for reform would be moving from a KPI focus on outputs to outcomes – ie. stop measuring how many schools are visited and start measuring how well they’re doing. Finally, introducing an independent evaluation authority like the Schools Evaluation Authority to monitor and regulate school performance, and hold PED’s accountable for improvement is absolutely critical.
Poor policy, low capacity and weak accountability result in gross inefficiency and poor outcomes. With improved qualification requirements, stronger recruitment processes and contextually relevant policies supported by affordable budgets, we might begin to see the system strengthen and, subsequently, improve its offering to schools. The net result? Strong SGBs supporting effective leaders, who lead quality teachers, who provide learners with an education that sets them up for success – an unstoppable domino effect toppling decades of inequality, ineptitude, greed and corruption.
Jonathan Molver is the founding Director of Proteus. He began his career as a teacher in Emalahleni and holds a bachelor’s in education as well as an NPQH. His career in teaching took him to the UK, where he taught as a Primary teacher before being appointed Primary school Principal of King Solomon Academy in London, one of the UK’s highest performing schools. After leading King Solomon Academy, Jonathan lead the Primary support team at Ark schools in the UK, providing curriculum, assessment and leadership support to the 25 primary schools within the network. He joined the Education Partnerships Group (EPG) as Country Director, South Africa, in 2017. In June 2023, he founded Proteus. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife, 3 children and young labradoodle in the outdoors.
Proteus works with government, the private sector and civil society to build stronger, equitable education systems. Our role is to facilitate improved coordination, cohesion and alignment across the sectors, so that every child has access to quality education. We do this by developing and implementing policies that work, designing strategies for scalable solutions that last, and building robust data collection and analysis systems that improve decision making.
