Should school heads be leaders, managers or both? A case study of Bulawayo government secondary schools in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The study sought to explore the type of skills needed by government secondary school heads in order for them to be effective. Hence, the study examined whether school heads could be effective if they employed either leadership skills, management skills or if they employed both skills. The main purpose of the study was to establish how any of the skills aforementioned could boost productivity in government secondary schools. The study was carried out in government secondary schools in Bulawayo. Only schools’ performance at O’ level was used as a measure of academic performance of the schools. The sample was made up of 60 respondents drawn from the secondary schools, heads of schools, District officers and other key informants in the education system like BSPZ coordinators and the newly appointed secondary school inspectors. Document analysis, observation, interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data under the following themes: leadership skills and tasks, management skills and tasks and the concepts of change, motivation, school mission and vision, community involvement and teachers’ needs to finally come out with the head’s recommended attributes. The assessment of school administration revealed transformation in the task with institutions gradually moving away from concentrating on day to day neat management tasks towards focusing on a unique, situational designed and visionary approach to school management which requires more leadership qualities. Interviews of education officers revealed that, whilst all government schools were guided by government policy, policy was not meant to kill the individual flair of heads. The focus group discussions revealed that leadership was needed in education as an answer to the dynamic and turbulent environment. The discussions revealed that with the ever changing times, it was the flexible leader who would be able to identify strategies that would take advantage of the changing environment; the strategies that would go in line with the globalization trends, who was needed by today’s school. Thus, most respondents believed that heads of schools could use leadership skills to create competitive advantage and uniqueness of schools, yet the issue of how policy could be successfully woven into heads’ plans remained debatable. The study therefore recommended that schools as business organizations needed leaders who clearly understood their role in the school production process.

Keywords: Leadership, management, school leadership and leadership tasks.