The Need

Despite significant investment, the education system in South Africa continues to under-perform. Whilst curriculum coverage has received a lot of attention, poor leadership and the consequent low morale and low performance in the classroom by educators has received less attention. Whilst curriculum coverage is critical, we ignore leadership in education at our peril. Researchers have identified poor leadership and management as a key contributing factor to the poor performance.

Through the monitoring and evaluation of our programmes and through research that has been conducted into our programmes, we have observed that the delivery of quality education in the classroom is directly impacted by the quality of leadership given by the leadership team and by the cohesiveness and morale of the staff team as a whole. This is borne out by other research that is widely available. 

Theory of Change

SEED’s Theory of Change states that developing leadership in education will lead to improved empowerment, resilience and health in schools which will improve teaching in the classroom and ultimately ensure enhanced learner achievement. 

Track Record

SEED Educational Trust is developing leaders in education since 2006, working in 5 provinces across South Africa to provide leadership development training and support to more than 1,500 school and district leaders across the country.

Since 2012, SEED has worked in 150 schools in the Eastern Cape and directly with 5 different district offices in the province. In 2019, SEED began a programme to build the capacity of Circuit Managers (CMs) across the province to improve their support and supervision skills. To date 133 CMs have completed the programme.

In 2023 SEED began to explore how it could work at scale and how it could impact the whole system rather than just a few districts and schools.

The School Leadership Development Facilitation Programme was identified as the first priority, and the programme began in August 2024 with 38 provincial and district officials developed to be facilitators of leadership development programmes across the province.

The impact of our programmes

As SEED’s organizational focus and its leadership programmes evolved over time, so have its various impact indicators. These have ranged from monitoring indicators such as school resilience (assessed via educators seeking jobs outside of education), to school staff rating the various aspects of school’s organizational climate (using five areas of organizational health: morale, goals, roles, processes and relationships), through to evaluating learner performance outcomes (for example, through comparing ‘before and after’ matric results for the targeted high schools). While these impact results were positive (with more detailed information available), the focus has since changed to more systemic impact evaluations.

These include a combination of internal impact measures (for example, ‘before and after’ required support ratings by the school principals for their respective Circuit Managers), or tracking the objective indicator of the Data Driven District platform education officials’ logins over time. Due to the systemic nature of our interventions, there is also a growing emphasis on the external or independent research reports.

In an effort to measure education sector performance, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) regularly commissions the School Monitoring Survey. The survey measures 12 key indicators including indicator number 12 which measures “the percentage of school principals rating the support services of districts as being satisfactory”. The 2024 report concludes: “A number of provinces showed notable increases from 2017 to 2022, with the largest increases from principals of schools in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo”. This reporting period coincides directly with SEED’s initiative to develop the capacity of 133 Circuit managers (63% of all Circuit Managers) in the Eastern Cape province and indicates that the support by senior leadership for the initiative as well as the programmes themselves contributed to a significant improvement in the support that principals received from Circuit Managers.

The SEED Educational Trust offers three streams of leadership programmes:

  1. The School Leadership Programme: aimed at School Management Teams to develop these school leaders to lead sustainable, systemic change in their schools – while taking their specific context into account.  Read More
  2. The District Leadership Programme: aimed at District officials to strengthen their ability to provide support and supervision to school leaders.  Read More
  3. The School Leadership Development & Facilitation Programme (SLDFP): a facilitation and programme design-focused leadership training aimed at the middle tier leadership (provincial and district officials) who provide training and support to schools. Can also be tailored for facilitators in Educational Not-for-Profit Organisations. The aim is to enable these leaders to design and facilitate their own training programmes in line with the researched needs of their target audiences (e.g. principals, School Management Teams, School Governing Bodies etc). Read more