The Learning Channel’s new Top Class programme, which is screened from this month, placed 10 CEOs from top businesses into 10 underachieving schools identified by the national department of education as having the potential to do better.
Top Class’s purpose: to make a difference. The CEOs’ brief: to help turn the schools around.
Can this be achieved? Over the next few months we’ll find out – is it mission possible or impossible?
The idea of placing business expertise in schools is not new internationally. Schools are moving from a culture of dependency to enterprise and the belief that schools can learn from good business practices is embedded in many principalship programmes. Globally, schools have to manage new challenges.
Strategic planning, organisational systems and resource management, tools that are essential in business, are being used increasingly in schools to ensure that their core business – teaching and learning – takes place despite these challenges and however limited their resources.
But placing business in education is also contentious. There are critical questions that must be asked, especially where this is short-term intervention rather than a development strategy.
Are the school leaders passive recipients of business intervention or is it an equal learning and development opportunity over time? Who identifies problems and finds solutions to address them? Is it a snapshot and instant judgement, or long exposure and measured judgement of what is happening in a particular school and, even more importantly, why it’s happening?
So how does Top Class address these questions? Well, it opts for the interventionist expert approach, in snapshot, instant judgment mode. It sends in its consultant – the big business boss – to each of the chosen schools. The consultant has been briefed on the school: s/he goes in, checks things out, tells the school what it should do – communicating this in a variety of ways – then leaves.
Five weeks later, the programme team revisits the school to see if the plan is working. Twelve months later, the team will return for the final visit. Judgement will then be made: has the school been turned around?
Clearly this is TV format rather than recognised good practice development. Where models of business and education sharing good practice are used effectively, work placements span a longer time frame; individuals bring practical and strategic ideas from one context to another, making leaders aware of other ways to do things – which may have applicability to their own context. So briefing notes and just one day in the life of a school is not the best way of understanding its organisational culture and what makes it work or not work.
In the words of management guru Stephen Covey: ”Seek first to understand.” So, how well do the CEOs understand the school context and the issues they are presented with? And how well do they address the problem areas for which they have been asked to find solutions? Well, as the engaging programme presenter Salamina Mphelo says: ”Let’s go take a look.”
This is a warts and all programme. There is no attempt to gloss over the exceptionally difficult situations each of these schools, rural and urban, are in. The issues do not surprise – the graphic depiction does. We are exposed to the lack of basic facilities (grossly inadequate toilets) and resources; safety and security issues for both educators and learners – weapons and gangsterism in school; learners’ and parents’ disaffection; late coming and lack of discipline; and cultural issues such as initiation, which can cause absenteeism at exam time.
But the most shocking issue was the low level of care and support that the schools receive from their provincial departments, on which they are still dependent, to address any of the identified problems.
That the school principals, deputies, heads of departments, school governing bodies and educators talk freely and frankly about the issues they face and have to deal with every day is not only brave but – as Martin Feinstein, one of the CEOs says – ”truly humbling”. And it is all credit to the CEOs that they made any sense of the almost insensible conditions under which the majority of South Africa’s schools operate.
The ”Talk Time” panel session in each programme would be more valuable if it included a principal – who had turned round a school in similar circumstances – to gauge his/her opinions on the CEOs’ strategies. But it was encouraging to hear the Deputy Director General in the national department, Palesa Tyobeka, admitting embarrassment at the exposure of the poor level of provincial support, generally, to the schools.
Despite the limitations of the approach this is a positive – and entertaining – way of providing strategic assistance and support to schools in desperate need. And in the case of so many schools, a quick fix is better than no fix.
Next month’s article will focus on the CEOs’ strategies for addressing the issues and the schools’ approaches to implementation. Top Class is screened every Wednesday at 11am on SABC 1.
Caroline Faulkner lectures on educational leadership and management at the Wits School of Education in the education leadership and policy studies division