Jan Heystek
Northwest University
Prof Jan Heystek is the Director for the Edu-Lead Research Entity at the North-West University in South Africa and research professor for education leadership. His current research focus on school improvement at schools in socio economic deprived areas. The focus for the research is understand and contribute to the sustainable academic improvement of most schools since most schools are currently underperforming. The emphasis is on the role of leadership in this process, considering the important influence of socio economic context for these communities. He is currently leading a large scale research project funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF). The focus of the project is to determine the influence of leadership in four provinces in collaboration with colleagues in the specific provinces. A mixed methodology will be followed over the three year period of the project. Prof Heystek is the co-author of two textbooks: Human resource management in education (2005) and People leadership in education (2008), as well as the author of seven chapters published in different international, supervised six doctoral and 33 master’s degree students and authored or co-authored of 40 articles in nationally and internationally refereed and accredited journals. He is a C2 rated academic.
According to the grade 12 pass rate, which is the criteria for quality education according to the Department of Basic Education, the South African education system is providing quality education since the pass rate for the... [ view full abstract ]
According to the grade 12 pass rate, which is the criteria for quality education according to the Department of Basic Education, the South African education system is providing quality education since the pass rate for the last few years has been above 70%. The nine provincial Departments of Basic Education label secondary schools as underperforming when the pass arte is lower than 70%. The underperformance label then combined with a process of accountability where the principal and or the heads of departments per school must account to higher officials why the school I underperforming and how they will improve the situation.
The focus for the presentation is to determine how principals as leaders reacted to the labelling and accountability processes in the process to ensure sustainable improvement of academic results for underperforming schools. Motivational theories are used to understand the leader’s reaction to the labelling and accountability processes.
Based on the research conducted in 18 secondary schools which included interviews with principals as well as focus group interviews with the school management team members and purposefully selected teachers, the selected schools reacted positively to the labelling and accountability. This data for this presentation is part of a larger three year project in four of the nine provinces and includes a qualities phase (2017 – data for this presentation), a quantitative phase (2018) and a qualitative phase (2019 – observation and interviews)
The results from this section of this projects indicates that the labelling and the accountability was in many cases the trigger (“stick” motivation) for the school to change since participants experienced the labelling and accountability as negative and did not want to be in the trapped status. It seems as if the principals played an important role at the schools to motivate the school management team and teachers to improve their teaching and learning performance. The accountability sessions in the schools served as extrinsic motivation to teachers since they have to report in staff meetings about the performance (and specifically about underperformance) of their subject. These accountability mostly only focused on the grade 12 group since that is the only grade which are used to determine the school’s academic performance.
It seems as if the labelling and accountability policy have short term success with based on external motivational via pressure and goal setting.
