The first group of 400 school principals has been enrolled for the South African National Professional Qualification for Principals. This is part of an initiative by the department of education to professionalise principalships and reclaim the status once attached to the position.
Participating principals’s feedback will be key in the further development of the qualification, which will be rolled out formally from 2009 and will be a compulsory requirement for any person wanting to be a principal.
The first intake of principals is spread across five higher education institutions, which met the preparation criteria set by the department and registered the qualification timeously with the Council on Higher Education. They are the University of Pretoria, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Martin Prew, director of the department’s directorate of education management and governance development, said the qualification is a practice-based one. This issue was raised by the South African Principals’ Association during the development of the qualification. ‘The assessment is done mainly on site for school-based projects that allow the candidate to show he or she has mastered the content and can translate the theory into practice,” said Prew.
Mentorship is another key element of the qualification and is being implemented in different ways by higher education institutions. ‘We are developing a number of support processes and providing funding for the training of mentors,” said Prew.
In addition to the school principals’ qualification, the department is developing a range of national courses for serving principals with a particular focus on curriculum management. Prew said these courses will be experiential.