Teachers’ perceptions of distributed leadership practice in three secondary schools within Gauteng province

The post 1994 era brought many changes in South African Education System, including how schools should be governed henceforth. The South African Schools Act, no 96 of 1996 was enacted in the parliament and it challenged the schools to adopt a more inclusive and participative approach in running their affairs. But the school’s hierarchical structure remained mandatory and continues to exist even today. It is against this backdrop that this study was conducted to explore the practice of distributed leadership (within school’s hierarchical structure) from teacher-based perspective, rather than educational theorists or legislators’ point of view. The three sampled secondary schools fall within Johannesburg North District 10 in Gauteng Province. The research design followed a qualitative approach. The data was collected through interviewing the teachers of different post levels (including principals) from the three sampled secondary schools, as individuals and in pairs. To triangulate the data, documents containing minutes of the planning sessions and the first staff meeting were also requested and used to check how duties and responsibilities are allocated to staff members in these three schools. The findings revealed that there are possibilities provided by distributed leadership, and also inherent and inevitable barriers to a distributive approach to leadership in the three secondary schools. The possibilities are that distributing leadership can raise school’s collective capacities, empower staff, and can encourage collaborative school cultures and decision-making; and as a result schools can function effectively because of the presence of collective agency in the execution of tasks. However, the barriers posed by the school’s hierarchical structure and the policy climate within which schools operate, cannot simply be underestimated or ignored, and it is naïve to assume that they would simply fall away to accommodate and support distributed leadership in schools.