Abstract

The advent of democracy saw a drastic increase in demands for a meaningful performance for South African schools. With principals’ abilities to lead and manage these schools coming under constant severe scrutiny, with the main emphasis being placed solely on the Grade 12 final examination results as a measure of their competencies. This paper therefore, attempted to investigate the merits of this argument. The statistical results from a multi-method design (that is, mixed method) used to collect data from (N=197) purposively sampled principals of secondary schools in the Free State Province of South Africa, revealed that 57% of the respondents cited indecisiveness by authorities, unequal/unfair treatment, lack of support, ill-discipline and politicking as challenges leading to poor performance of their schools. This paper found no conclusive basis to support the argument.

Key words: Leadership qualities, management, public schools, performance, challenges, grade 12 results.