Principals, politics and the pandemic: How school principals led their schools during the COVID-19 crisis

• In Event: Thirty years later: Education in a (still) Divided South Africa

Proposal

The COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020 to April 2022) caused severe disruption to face-to-face schooling and curriculum delivery for all communities across the globe (Zepeda & Lanoue, 2021), and in this, the role of the principal, as leader, became critical. The Standards for Principalship in South Africa (Government Gazette, 2016) calls for innovation and principals as change-agents, where, following departmental guidelines and policies are bureaucratically standard practice. As a novice principal (Moorosi & Grant, 2018), I was intrigued by how exemplary principals, in four of the education districts of the Western Cape in South Africa, led their schools during the COVID-19 crisis. By engaging with the theory of leadership presence, I wondered where and how, in these circumstances, did exemplary leadership emerge in the pandemic. And what exactly did these exemplary principals actually do in the course of leading their schools, how did their leadership actions impact on the school community and why did different principals lead in the ways that they did? To answer these questions, I employed an interpretive paradigm in a qualitative approach to collect the data using two methods: interviews and questionnaires. To gather my initial data I used an open-ended questionnaire technique from which, through a snowballing effect, I sampled my five cases. From there an in-depth semi-structured interview approach was used as the main data collection tool. Data analysis using ATLAS.ti software (Gupta, 2024), revealed three main findings from the research. One, that an emergent principal-leadership approach is underscored by an organically centric leadership philosophy. Two, the disruption of the unprecedented complexities of the pandemic to the normative attributes, that is to decision-making and communication skills of the principalship, led to an emerging principal-leader that is more reflexive. And three, that the propositions (physical, intellectual, spiritual, emotional and political) identified in the emerging theory of leadership presence, especially in under-resourced schools, was supported by the evidence from my case principals thus allowing for a signature that re-imagines schooling and school leadership post COVID-19. Although the study had three main limitations, the problem of memory and the different views on exemplarity, the decision to have one person collect, interpret and analyse the data collected, and in addition, the generalizability of the study, because of the small size of the sample of case principals allows for the re-examination of education leadership in a divided world.

Author

• TREVOR DAROCHA, Portavue Primary School