School principals' experiences of the decentralisation policy in Zimbabwe

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The decentralisation of power in education is part of a global process that has become part of the education reform policies of most countries. Decentralisation, which is typified by the redistribution of power to local levels, is claimed to serve a variety of ends from democratization to efficiency, empowerment of stakeholders to improved quality of education. It is, however, a complex process that is difficult to capture as power is seen to manifest in multiple ways. During the nineties Zimbabwe, against the background of a massive increase in enrolments, for a variety of reasons including the improvement of the quality of education, embarked on the re-distribution of administrative and financial power in the Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture. The implementation of this policy revealed major discrepancies between the intentions of government and the way it translated in educational sites.The aim of this study is to explore how the intentions of decentralisation in education as a policy aimed that the improvement of the quality of education is experienced by school principals. An interpretative methodology with in depth interviews, focus groups, some observations and document analysis were employed to engage in the debates about decentralisation. Although this was a small study the findings concurred with studies of decentralisation in other countries where it was found that the re-distribution of power in education manifests differently in different contexts in the same country. In countries such as Zimbabwe where resource limitations and restructuring concomitantly took place the experience of principals revealed that conditions arose that could not be seen to be conducive to the improvement of the quality of education such as the ambiguity of the meaning of who is responsible for what, the power struggles as government was seen to recentralise crucial roles, increased workloads of principals due to the devolving of administrative and supervisory functions to school level, loss of teachers and other specialist functionaries conducive to a drop in standards and the challenge to parents who had to contribute increasingly to enable schooling of their children. These findings are indicative of the claims from studies in other countries that decentralisation as a policy for whatever reason is seldom more than political rhetoric to decentralise conflict.Exploring the intersection between the literature on decentralisation and parental involvement of education, however, revealed the opening up of other spaces that enabled local power relations to develop in creative ways as parents got increasingly involved in schools. Apart from the challenges related to the redistribution of power as authority delegated, devolved or deconcentrated from government, this study revealed that power manifests in relations and interactions not necessarily ascribed to the intentions of policy, neither as a substance or function only.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University