Principal leadership matters in South African schools, but transformational claims outrun the evidence
Introduction
Ask almost anyone in South African education why some schools do better than others in similar conditions and the answer sooner or later lands on the principal. Memela and Ramrathan (2022) start from the view that school leadership and learner performance remain a great concern in the system, and the principals they interviewed told stories in which their own leadership played an important part in both management and learner results. Heystek (2022) likewise reports that schools in deprived areas can still perform when leaders hold a vision together and look after learners in very difficult situations. The idea has plenty of appeal. It also has a habit of growing larger than the evidence behind it, especially when transformational leadership is offered as the fix (Li and Karanxha, 2024).
This paper argues that principal leadership probably does matter for learner results in South Africa, but that the case for transformational leadership in particular is thinner than it usually sounds, and that the evidence leans more towards an instructional focus carried by a working school management team (SMT) than towards any single leadership style. It looks first at what the system asks of principals and SMTs, then at what South African studies say about transformational and integrated leadership, then at how SMTs actually function, and finally at how far the evidence reaches on learner outcomes. Most of the material is qualitative and drawn from small samples (Heystek, 2022; Tsakeni et al., 2023), and some of it rests on what principals say about themselves (Shava, 2021; Memela and Ramrathan, 2022).
What the system asks of principals and SMTs
Principals work inside an accountability system that leaves less room for personal style than leadership theory tends to assume. Bantwini and Moorosi (2023) interviewed school principals and argue that accountability in South Africa, as a constitutional requirement, is not out of place by international standards. The trouble, in their account, is the way the reforms are carried out, which they call questionable, tangled up with political interference and mostly productive of compliance at the schools’ own peril. They conclude that reform needs strong legal accountability balanced by the capacity to improve the system. For a principal this probably means a lot of hours go on answering demands from above, which are hours not spent on teaching and learning. That inference sits on top of principals’ perceptions and the authors’ own normative conclusions, so it reads best as an informed account of how the system feels from the principal’s chair, not a measure of what compliance costs learners (Bantwini and Moorosi, 2023; Memela and Ramrathan, 2022).
Memela and Ramrathan (2022) frame the whole question against the record of poor learner performance since the attainment of democracy, and they add that the causes are many and varied. That framing is worth keeping hold of. If many factors feed poor performance, leadership can at most be one of them, and a study that asks principals about leadership will naturally hear about leadership. The point matters for what follows, because most of the South African evidence is gathered exactly that way (Memela and Ramrathan, 2022; Bantwini and Moorosi, 2023).
The SMT is the structure through which principals are meant to share the load. Tapala (2021), in a chapter that reviews the literature, treats the SMT as the school’s leadership structure and says that because it works so closely with curriculum implementation it needs a particular level of knowledge and skill in curriculum leadership and management. That sounds reasonable, and it also puts a heavy burden on the middle layer of the school. Chabalala and Naidoo (2021) found, in two Gauteng schools, that when the roles and responsibilities of middle managers are not explicit, their ability to do the dual job of teaching and managing at the same time is compromised. So an SMT may exist on the staff list without functioning as a team in practice, which is a modest inference from two small sources but one worth keeping in view as the rest of the argument unfolds (Chabalala and Naidoo, 2021; Tapala, 2021).
Transformational leadership and what South African studies support
Heystek (2022) is probably the strongest South African source for a people-centred view of leadership. The study, set in deprived socio-economic contexts, sampled four schools in each of four provinces and interviewed the principal, one SMT member and one senior teacher at each, plus a focus group of Grade 12 learners. The conclusions are that motivation and creating a vision matter, that many principals were described as strict but were caring for learners in very difficult situations, and that principals can lead schools towards better academic results through a people-oriented approach built on relationships and intrinsic motivation. This reads a lot like transformational leadership, although Heystek does not need the label to make the point. Still, the schools were purposively sampled and the evidence is perception, so the study describes what stakeholders say about principals in a particular set of schools and cannot show what would happen if a struggling school copied the style. It lines up with the view in Memela and Ramrathan (2022) that principals’ leadership matters, although theirs comes from principals alone.
One detail in Heystek’s findings sits oddly with textbook transformational leadership, which is that the principals were often described as strict. Strictness and care may well be two sides of the same concern for learners, and that is how Heystek frames it, but transformational leadership is usually described in terms of inspiration and individual consideration and not firmness. It could be that the label simply stretches to cover whatever seems to work in a given school, which would make it hard to test. Cornelissen and Smith (2022) hint at something similar when they describe an approach that takes in various leadership approaches, the personality traits of principals and the situational context all at once, and that sort of breadth is exactly what makes an effect hard to isolate (Heystek, 2022).
Two other South African studies push for a blend of styles. Shava (2021) examined the integration of instructional and transformational models through semi-structured interviews with principals in one educational province, and reports that integrating the two had the potential to enhance learner performance and produced a climate that promotes a culture of teaching and learning. Cornelissen and Smith (2022) studied five successful National Strategy for Learner Attainment secondary schools in Cape Town, collecting questionnaires and interviews from principals, teachers and SMT members, and recommend an integrated principal leadership framework that also takes the situational context into account. Neither study pulls the transformational part apart from the instructional part, so it is hard to say which does the work. On top of that, Cornelissen and Smith picked schools already counted as successful, and Shava’s data come from principals themselves, which means the claim that integration works is closer to a hypothesis than a finding.
Outside South Africa the picture is no tidier. Li and Karanxha (2024) review 14 empirical studies published between 2006 and 2019 on transformational school leadership and student achievement, and report that most were conducted in Western, English-speaking countries and that the results were mixed. They also recommend an integrated leadership framework and more attention to complexity. So the South African studies echo a recommendation the wider literature makes, but the wider literature does not offer a settled positive effect for transformational leadership either. Put side by side, the local work is encouraging but qualitative and small, while the one systematic review of effects on achievement reports mixed results (Li and Karanxha, 2024; Shava, 2021; Heystek, 2022).
Instructional leadership and the SMT in practice
The instructional side of the story is more concrete. Chabalala and Naidoo (2021) used three domains of instructional leadership as their framework, which are defining the school mission, managing the instructional programme and promoting a positive learning climate, and interviewed four teachers and four middle managers at two Gauteng schools. Three themes came out, namely understanding good instructional leadership practices, teacher development as an instructional practice and the provision of instructional resources. Their conclusion is that principals are more than managers or administrators and need to carve out time for instructional leadership in constricted schedules. That lines up with the compliance pressure described by Bantwini and Moorosi (2023), because a principal buried in reporting has less time for classrooms. The link is a reading of the two studies together, and neither tests it directly.
Distributed leadership gives the SMT its clearest job. Tsakeni et al. (2023) studied four high schools, two suburban and two township, that had put science and mathematics on their improvement agendas, interviewing principals, deputy principals, heads of department and teachers. They report that distributed leadership practices influenced the teaching and learning of science and mathematics irrespective of a school’s socioeconomic status, and that the schools built useful improvement mechanisms that fitted the distributed arrangements already in place. The authors recommend making distributed leadership a topic in professional development for science and mathematics teachers. Four schools is a small base, and the schools were chosen because they prioritised those subjects, so the finding speaks to how distribution can work and not to how often it does. It fits Tapala’s (2021) point that SMT members need real curriculum knowledge, though.
The studies do not fully agree on where leadership energy should go. Heystek (2022) locates the difference in a people-oriented approach and in relationships, Chabalala and Naidoo (2021) in instructional practices such as teacher development and resources, and Bantwini and Moorosi (2023) in the accountability settings that shape what principals can do at all. These are not strictly contradictory, because each study asked a different question of different people. Even so, they send different messages to a department deciding where to invest, whether in principal selection and character, in middle manager capability or in changing how schools are held to account. Nothing in the sources allows those options to be ranked against each other, which is itself a finding about how thin the comparative evidence is.
Taken together, these studies suggest a division of labour that the transformational label tends to hide. A principal’s vision and relationships appear to set the climate (Heystek, 2022), while heads of department and other SMT members turn that climate into curriculum monitoring, teacher development and resource provision (Chabalala and Naidoo, 2021; Tsakeni et al., 2023). If that is right, appointing or training a charismatic principal on its own would do little where the middle layer is thin or its roles are unclear. This is an interpretation across studies that differ in design and setting, so it should be held loosely, but it goes some way to explaining why the same call for integration keeps turning up.
How far the evidence reaches on learner outcomes
When it comes to learner outcomes, the South African studies mostly stop short. Memela and Ramrathan (2022) rely on the lived stories of secondary school principals and report that a principal’s leadership plays an important role in school management and learner performance. That is a finding about how principals see their own role, not a measure of learner results, and principals may have reasons of their own to see leadership as decisive. Heystek (2022) does bring in teachers, SMT members and learners, which helps, yet the outcome there is still described and not measured. A reader hunting for effect sizes in the South African material will not find them in these sources.
Some quantitative evidence comes from Ethiopia. Gechere et al. (2025) gathered data from 369 respondents in 22 secondary schools in the Wolaita Zone, with interviews of eight principals, and found positive correlations between principals’ instructional leadership and student performance (R = 0.78) and between teacher efficacy and student performance (R = 0.88). They read this as showing that collaborative, teaching-focused leadership builds teachers’ confidence and efficacy and so lifts achievement. Correlations that high make a causal reading tempting, but the design is correlational, the questionnaire data are perceptions, and the education system is a different one, so the numbers are suggestive for South Africa at most. Even so, the route they point to, with leadership working through teachers’ efficacy and not straight onto learners, is a useful hypothesis for SMT research here (Gechere et al., 2025; Li and Karanxha, 2024).
A better test would hold context roughly constant. Cornelissen and Smith (2022) deliberately chose successful schools, and none of the South African studies reviewed here describes a comparison with weaker schools, so they cannot say how often the same practices turn up where results are poor. Li and Karanxha (2024) note how heavily the wider literature leans on Western and English-speaking settings and call for more attention to complexity, which in South Africa would have to include language, resources and provincial administration. Studies that follow SMT practice over a few years and link it to learner results would be the obvious next step, even though they are slow and expensive to run.
What the South African context changes is mostly the conditions under which leadership operates. Cornelissen and Smith (2022) and Heystek (2022) study schools in demanding contexts, and Bantwini and Moorosi (2023) describe an accountability system that can push principals towards compliance. In that setting a transformational vision competes with reporting duties for a principal’s time, and the SMT is expected to carry curriculum leadership with roles that may not be clearly set out (Chabalala and Naidoo, 2021). That combination suggests policy attention should go to how the SMT works and to the accountability load on principals before it goes to leadership style. The evidence is not strong enough to say so with confidence, and it would be wrong to claim that style is irrelevant, but the weight of what is available seems to lean that way.
Conclusion
Principals matter, and the South African studies reviewed here agree on that much (Memela and Ramrathan, 2022; Heystek, 2022). What they do not establish is that transformational leadership as such produces better learner results. The strongest-looking claims are for an integrated approach that mixes people-centred leadership with a focus on teaching, and even those come from small, mostly qualitative studies that rely heavily on what principals and teachers report (Shava, 2021; Cornelissen and Smith, 2022). The wider review of transformational leadership and achievement reports mixed results, which is a reason for caution when the label travels into South African policy talk (Li and Karanxha, 2024).
Three modest steps follow. Role descriptions for heads of department and other middle managers could be made explicit, since unclear roles compromise their dual task (Chabalala and Naidoo, 2021). Leadership development could treat the SMT as the unit to be developed and not only the principal, in line with the distributed practice reported by Tsakeni et al. (2023). And research could start linking SMT practices to measured learner outcomes across comparable schools, so that claims about leadership style can finally be tested against more than testimony. Until that happens, the safest reading is that leadership matters through the way principals and SMTs organise teaching, and that the transformational label adds more enthusiasm than evidence.
Reference list
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