Principalship Educational Policy Challenges in the Management of a Turbulent School Environment

Abstract

The chapter reports on the findings of a small-scale mixed-method study conducted amongst thirty sampled school principals. In the study, the principals share their challenges and achievements in implementing COVID-19 responsive policies in a turbulent school environment threatened by the pandemic. We sought to understand the experiences of principals in managing the implementation of policies necessary to make situational analyses in navigating the unstable academic year. We used the concepts of geographies of place and situational leadership to understand first, how principals managed to implement the national and provincial policies to ensure learners share available learning space without physical contact. Second, it was to understand the implementation of curriculum recovery programmes meant to mitigate against lost teaching time. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques were used to generate data to answer research questions that underpinned the study. The findings suggest that principals faced challenges in implementing the policies in areas of phasing in all grades, ensuring continuity of teaching and learning due to intermittent outbreaks of COVID-19 infections. This resulted in the loss of schooling time because of temporary closures of schools and the absence of teachers which impacted negatively on curriculum delivery.

1. Introduction

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 that led to protracted school closures severely affected the South African education system. Poor infrastructure and the lack of disaster management policies and structures for managing the crisis exacerbated the turmoil that prevailed at both the education policy domain and the school level. There was a policy disjuncture between what was portrayed as the situation that existed at the schools by the Joint Teacher Unions, a collaboration of different teacher unions, and what the districts were reporting to the national and provincial departments. The principals were under pressure from both the national and provincial education departments to implement the COVID-19 response guidelines in a complex and turbulent environment. As leaders in schools during this crisis, principals were relied upon by both the national and provincial education departments keen on saving the academic year. Hence, quick-fix policy responses and decisions caused tensions between the policymakers at the national level and Joint Teacher Unions [1].

2. Contextual background

When the Department of Basic Education (DBE) Minister announced the reopening of the education sector she emphasised that the decision resulted from scientific deliberations where a phased approach had been recommended to manage the risks of COVID-19 infection. Office-based staff had to return to work on 4 May 2020 followed by the School Management Teams (SMTs) on 11 May. Next was the teaching staff on May 18. Grades 7 and 12 learners later followed on 8 June 2020 [2]. The DBE wanted to start with these grades because of their maturity as senior learners at the exit points of the junior and the senior grades, respectively. With their maturity, they would assist to orientate the younger learners who would follow later thus limiting the risks of infection [3]. The reopening of schools in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa presented school principals with a predicament of ensuring that teaching and learning occurred despite the difficult circumstances posed by restrictions in response to the raging pandemic.

This chapter presents the findings of a small-scale study that involved the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods to generate data from sampled principals of schools under UMgungundlovu District, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The chapter sought to elicit insights from the experiences of principals in implementing the COVID-19 policy guidelines for managing a turbulent and crisis-driven school environment. The chapter further seeks to understand, from the principals’ experiences, how they handled challenges and achievements in implementing COVID-19 policy guidelines in a disruptive and unstable school environment. To achieve this objective, the researchers set the following two guiding questions:

1. How did the principals implement policy guidelines of the DBE to manage COVID-19 in schools?

2. What were the principals’ challenges and achievements in implementing the policy Guidelines?

With 487 public schools under its jurisdiction UMgungundlovu Education District, operated under these challenging circumstances. The schools are spread throughout this big district serving rural, urban, township and farming communities from different ethnic groups and socio-economic backgrounds. The schools are grouped into 17 circuits (circuits being a demarcated group of schools under the management of a circuit manager). Circuits contain a varying number of schools ranging between 23 and 34 schools. The unprecedented challenges posed by COVID-19 in schools required leadership that understood the situation at hand and was capable of flexible decision-making to ensure teaching and learning in a turbulent environment. This study would enable the management of UMgungundlovu Education District to gain insight into the principals’ leadership experiences within this environment.

3. Literature review: policy landscape for managing COVID-19 in schools

We reviewed the literature on the international trends of social distancing in education and the South African policy development landscape pertaining to the school context. Our review is organised into four broad themes. The first part portrays the relationship between social distancing and the risk-adjusted approach for the reopening of schools. The second part reviews the COVID-19 policy landscape as it applies to the complex and unstable school situation. The third focuses on the duties of COVID-19 Committees in schools, and the fourth highlights measures that are taken to prevent the spread of the pandemic within schools.

4. The DBE policy guidelines on the safe reopening of schools

The DBE under the guidance of the Department of Health (DoH) developed standard operating procedures (SOPs) to prepare all administrators on how to stop the spread, and manage COVID-19 cases within schools [2]. The SOPs explain the measures and protocols to be followed in the education sector to ensure safety against COVID-19 infections. Its main objective is to explain procedures to be followed by office managers, and school leadership in case there is a confirmed or suspected incident of COVID-19 infection in the work or school space [2]. These guidelines equip all leaders with information on how to act rationally and calmly when handling emerging cases. The guidelines also explain important terms used in the COVID-19 context, for instance, exposure levels, which explain how much contact a suspected individual has had with one whose infection has been confirmed by testing with another one who has been confirmed to have the infection and quarantine, which explains a period that one should spend in isolation from other people after testing or coming to contact with a confirmed case. This period had initially been put on 14 days but on 17 July 2020 the National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) reduced it to 10 days minimum following guidelines from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

4.1 Duties of COVID-19 committees at school

The guidelines position principals as compliance officers at schools, responsible to apply all prescribed COVID-19 measures. These include the creation of COVID-19 committees. Although the COVID-19 pandemic demands a task-oriented response from leadership, situational factors like the skills and maturity to manage certain responsibilities oblige principals to delegate duties in a people-oriented manner. This necessitates the understanding of the levels of competency team members possess to carry particular responsibilities [4, 5]. COVID-19 conditions presented novel challenges to all concerned at the school level. Relevant training on COVID-19 for committee members to gain knowledge and confidence needed to be ensured by the principal of the school.

Duties of the committees included a range of activities such as initiating COVID-19 awareness programmes for their schools and communities; erecting signs and posters educating the public about hands and respiratory cleanliness; preparing and maintaining hand washing stations containing soap and water, 5 m away from toilets and bathrooms; ensuring the availability of hand sanitisers with a 70% alcohol content at entrance points of classrooms, teacher staff rooms, reception and waiting areas, and all offices; managing daily removal of garbage from the school; and ensuring that the school buildings are properly cleaned and disinfected as per the DBE regulations. These committees are also tasked with the preparation of well-ventilated and equipped rooms for isolation purposes. They are also responsible to ensure the observance of social distancing in all spaces of the school and to encourage learners, and staff to properly wear their face masks. Another important duty for the committee is to ensure that there is enough personal protective equipment (PPE), for the entire school community.

5. Conceptual framework

This research sought to examine the principals’ experiences, challenges and achievements in the application of policy guidelines for managing and preventing the spread of COVID-19 infection in school premises. To achieve this objective, it is necessary to understand the type of leadership that principals needed to respond to the immediate demands of spatial organisation, policy adherence and management of the school. Therefore, we adopted two theoretical constructs to explain the kind of leadership, place and space in this context: geographies of place and situational leadership. This concept will explain how the learners are placed in classrooms in consideration of the social distancing measures. Second, we have considered situational leadership as the befitting perspective to understand how principals played their roles in implementing the COVID-19 policies in a turbulent and unpredictable environment. The two concepts are defined below.

5.1 Geographies of place: organisation of schooling spaces during COVID-19

The notion of geographies focuses on the observation, the study and the interpretation of people’s lived experiences within their places. Place can be understood as a socially constructed space where people ‘belong’ and interact to share resources. Physical contact occurs easily amongst people within close geographic locations [6, 7]. Schooling communities exist within close proximity, hence [8] description of schools as ‘contact zones’. Social distancing measures compelled schools to review their spatial settings to discourage the sharing of personal properties and enforce the wearing of face masks. The spatial manoeuver became important in the management of COVID-19 in places where teachers and learners have to coexist [9]. These new arrangements to influence behaviour within the school require the school leadership to respond with a clear awareness of the situation [9, 10, 11]. School leadership, especially principals, was expected to understand all the risks involved in dealing with a highly contagious disease in a space that is dominated by human contact. Managing COVID-19 demanded that principals perform different tasks that included communicating with different stakeholders such as parents, teachers, district officials and learner transport operators. Ensuring that all PPE for the school is available and monitoring human movement within the school was a huge responsibility. A task-oriented form of leadership was therefore required to successfully perform these tasks. To achieve this, principals had to delegate duties and manage personnel [2, 11, 12].

5.2 Situational leadership: responding to the COVID-19 crisis

South Africa took a ‘risk-adjusted approach’ when reopening schools under the prevalence of the epidemic. It was then necessary to understand the risks involved and how to manage them [13]. According to Ref. [11], situational leadership is best suited for understanding the attended risks and for immediate decision-making. That requires sound awareness of the situation or crisis and a provision of a response that is clear, appropriate and effective. Situational leaders apply flexibility when they respond to the presented challenges. They prioritise the development of individual team members in the workplace. Situational leaders may be task-oriented where they are directly involved by giving instructions and directives mostly to inexperienced individuals. On the other hand, they may play a supportive role especially with matured and experienced team members. It is expected that situational leaders respond to the situation appropriately and with integrity while respecting the structure and the culture of the organisation they represent. Having clarity of vision as to what needs to be attained within particular situations encourages situational leaders to devise innovative and adaptive strategies to achieve their goals [11, 12].

5.3 Methodology

The purpose of the study is to understand the experiences of principals in implementing COVID-19 policies in a school environment that is characterised by turbulence and unpredictability. Survey questionnaires which contained open-ended questions were distributed to the sampled 30 schools. A qualitative approach was used to solicit the views of principals on their experiences, challenges, successes and lessons learned in managing the policy implementation at the school.

5.4 Sampling strategy

Random stratified sampling was used to choose 30 schools representing all quintile rankings from all 17 circuits of UMgungundlovu District. Stratified random sampling is part of a larger family of non-probability sampling [14]. It ensures that different groups or segments of a population acquire sufficient representation [15]. In the context of this study, we sought to ensure balance amongst rural, urban and township schools that constitute the education district. From these intended groups, individual schools were randomly selected for the study. Random sampling ensures that everyone has equal opportunity of being selected for participation in the study [15].

5.5 Data collection and analysis

Hard copies of the questionnaires were sent to school principals after obtaining authorisation from the Head of Department (HOD) of the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education and UMgungundlovu District Director. The principals completed the questionnaires and returned them to the researchers at the district office. A box had been prepared for this purpose. The study was qualitative in that it captured and interpreted the narratives of the individual principals who had been randomly identified. We used qualitative research content analysis which focused on the participants’ responses to the questions. Key ideas were elicited from the responses, and thereafter, similar ideas were grouped together into themes [16].

5.6 Ethical issues

We observed all the necessary ethical considerations including seeking written permission from the HOD of the provincial Department of Education and the District Director of UMgungundlovu to conduct the study. Consent letters from these authorities accompanied the questionnaires to participating principals who had been requested to sign their own letters of consent to participate in the study. Schools were allocated pseudonyms to conceal their identities.

6. Presentation of findings

In presenting the findings, we first outline what emerged from the questionnaires which formed a quantitative dimension of the study, and the narratives focused on the experiences, challenges and achievements in policy implementation. The data are presented under three broad themes:

Principals’ experiences with implementing social distancing principles; the challenges in managing and delivering the curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic and the principals’ areas of achievement in policy implementation.

6.1 Principals’ experiences in implementing social distancing principles

The findings indicate that the principals’ experiences were largely characterised by difficulties relating to tasks that they had to perform and manage while implementing the policy. First, they had to implement social distancing within the limited available classroom space where learning had to occur with no physical or close contact between teachers and learners. Second, they were mandated to deliver and manage the curriculum in a turbulent and unpredictable school environment. Third, they were to supervise the execution of daily routine tasks of the screening of teachers and learners and sanitisation to ensure compliance with COVID-19 policies. Fourth, they were tasked with implementing curriculum recovery programmes in an environment characterised by anxiety and fear.

Given that principals’ experiences were characterised by difficulties and challenges, the discussion here focuses on that particular theme. Since schools are contact zones with fixed boundaries [8]. Principals had a duty of extending available space to make possible the prescribed distance of 1–1.5 metres between the learners’ seats in a classroom. Different models of attendance were available to choose from. Schools chose and applied models in a manner that would meet their individual requirements. Out of the 25 schools in this study, 23 opted for the alternate-day approach. This was done in different ways with grades, in some instances, changing days to attend school, like in the case of Tholulwazi Primary where ‘different grades attend on different dates’, and Masakhane Primary where ‘Grade R and Grade 1 attended on different days and Grade 5 and Grade 6 also come to school on different days’. This arrangement also assisted schools like Busisiwe Primary where ‘Grade 2, Grade 3 and also Grades 5 and 6 are using one classroom due to shortage of space’. In other instances, a class of learners was divided into two groups that come to school on a rotational bases skipping days, as was the case with Zanokuhle and Thokoza Primary schools, In Thokoza ‘each class is divided into two groups and those two groups alternate daily’. Many other schools did the same. Some used a bi-weekly approach where different grades alternated on a weekly rotational basis.

Other schools such as Graceland Combined used the alternate day model with special internal arrangements where certain grades attended full time: ‘Grade 7 and Grade 12 attend classes on [a] daily basis and these other grades come to school on two days each’. Madiba Primary, starting from Grade R to Grade 7 applied the same model as their ‘Grade Rs and Grade 7s come daily and the remaining grades alternate days’. Goodness Primary applied mixed models by using both bi-weekly and alternate days approach ‘because of the huge number of learners’: ‘Some grades are going to alternate on [a] weekly basis and others on [a] daily rotation basis’.

A well-resourced school like Thokozani Primary with a large campus and available space to manoeuver maintained the status quo as it ‘applied for and received deviation from protocol. The whole school came back on the 6^th of July 2020’. Moya, primary a small yet similarly well-resourced school could also afford to maintain the status quo.

Mandla intermediate, which had chosen an alternate day model, was forced to revert back to having all learners attending at the same time as the school experienced challenges with learner transport vehicle owners who were ‘not prepared to transport few learners’. The principal, however, did not explain how the school managed social distancing under these circumstances. Uthando Primary had a similar experience where ‘learner transport is not keen on bringing learners [to school] if the number is too little’. But the school still persevered with its alternate day model with Grade R and Grade 1 attending daily while ‘Grade 4, Grade 6, and Grades 5 and 7 alternate days’.

These models of social distancing presented both advantages and disadvantages to the schools. Some of the advantages included the realisation of ‘effective teaching and learning due to manageable class sizes’, as Benzakahle Primary Principal indicated. There were however a number of challenges. For instance, the principal of Kingdom Combined complained that ‘learners did not do the work allocated to them in the week at home’. Esethu Primary and Dumisani Primary Principals discovered that ‘other learners confused the days that they are supposed to come to school on or [just] absent themselves’. Some other schools experienced similar challenges.

Inhlanhla Primary Principal noticed that the curriculum was ‘moving at a slower pace since learners are not seen every day’ and that ‘most assessment tasks have to be done at home without teacher supervision’. Bhekathina Primary Principal realised that due to skipping days, learners struggle ‘to link the concepts they studied on the previous days’. These challenges constitute the disadvantages of using rotational models of attendance.

6.2 Provision of isolation rooms

The policy guidelines compelled schools to have an isolation room or sick room to accommodate individuals with suspected infections. Specific requirements for setting up an isolation room had been laid out in the policy, e.g. the room had to be situated at the entrance of the school with separate toilet facilities [2]. Some of these requirements could not be met by disadvantaged schools’ makeshift isolation rooms despite the innovative arrangements applied by the principals to convert available space. Identified spaces included offices at uMthetho, Moya and Busisiwe primary schools and a library, at Emfundweni Primary. Other spaces were unused classrooms as in the case of Thandokuhle Primary and Graceland. One for isolation, this being Uthando Primary even made use of an on-site security guard’s house. This made some of the rooms unsuitable for the original purpose. Senzeni Primary mentioned that they did not have an isolation room and no provision was made for this lack.

6.3 Impact of COVID-19 on the schools’ fundraising efforts

To keep the spaces safe from infections, schools had to be fumigated every day when the learners left the premises [2]. Subsequently, renting out of school spaces to the public to use for various functions could no longer happen as explained in KZN Circular 41 of 2020. This resulted in the loss of revenue that schools generated from these fundraising efforts. Mostly, the under-resourced schools were negatively affected by this arrangement. Othandweni Primary Principal lamented that this ‘had a huge negative impact; the school has a tuck shop which it uses for income. A lot of fundraising activities were compromised’. Thethani Combined Principal regretted that the new arrangement affected the school ‘negatively because the school hall was used as a wedding venue previously’. Umthetho Primary Principal complained that the new arrangement ‘has affected us negatively since there was a church that was using a classroom on Sundays. They have now stopped paying rent’. Inhlanhla Primary Principal bemoaned the fact that the ‘income received from rental of classrooms is now nil’. Lethiwe Principal even stipulated the amount lost when she said that there has been ‘no income for rental from March – loss of R12000’.

6.4 Challenges of curriculum delivery and management during the pandemic

The presented data show how difficult it was for principals to cope in managing the delivery of the school curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teaching and learning were disrupted due to COVID-19 infections. Table 1 depicts the combined statistics of cases of infection to both teachers and learners, with the quarantine of teachers and the closing of schools from June when the schools reopened to October when this study was conducted. This depiction is necessary as it reveals the amount of teaching and learning time lost to the pandemic within a short time.

Schools affected by COVID-19	Number of affected learners	Number of affected teachers	Teachers in quarantine	Days schools closed
12 out of 30	17	17	13	31

Table 1.

COVID-19 cases and teaching time lost.

Table 1 highlights that whilst the principals adhered to policy guidelines of screening people, sending them to quarantine and closing schools for decontamination, they were being robbed of important assets for curriculum delivery: time and personnel in the form of teachers, learners and days lost [2, 17]. In total, 17 teachers from 12 schools went into isolation and/or quarantine for a period of about 10 days. This was not the only dilemma that principals faced as there were other cases of absenteeism, like family responsibility leave, that added to the challenges. The most serious challenge came from the absence of teachers who had to be away from school as per the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC) Agreement 1 of 2020. Under this agreement, the concession was made for teachers with high-risk comorbidities and those who are over 60 years of age to work from home while the country was on Alert Levels 3 and 2 of the state of disaster [18].

The principals complained that the teachers who remained at home on concession were not substituted. Thandokuhle Primary Principal moaned that ‘for three months, since June, the teacher who applied for comorbidity has been absent and her subjects have not been taught due to shortage of staff’. Othandweni Primary principal stressed that the ‘absence of educators has a huge negative impact on subjects being taught as learners lost learning time’. Zwelonke Primary Principal revealed that ‘teachers who attend school regularly are being burdened with relief [duties]’ which makes ‘frustration levels high amongst staff due to continuous changing of subjects to teach’. To recover the lost time some schools, like Lethiwe, arranged Saturday and morning classes with teachers for higher grades. Others like Bongisizwe, arranged for afternoon classes. For Esethu Primary, the impact left by the absence of teachers was ‘addressed by requesting teachers to draft a catch-up plan upon return to school’. Goodness Primary applied a similar strategy.

Table 2 shows the varying levels of confidence amongst the schools in the completion of assigned tasks, and their comparison with the implementation of curriculum recovery programmes and completion of assessment tasks. The findings show the negative impact of the turbulent schooling year that principals had to contend with. The Policy Guidelines made efforts at trimming the tasks, yet the situation looked bleak as schools lost days due to sudden outbreaks of the virus and the subsequent enforced quarantine periods.

	Levels of confidence
	Very high	High	Moderate	Low	Very low	Unsure
Completing tasks	1	5	4	—	3	17
Curriculum recovery programmes	5	—	6	1	1	17
Assessment tasks completed	4	9	—	1	—	17

Table 2.

Levels of confidence in curriculum recovery programmes.

Furthermore, Table 2 shows 17 principals who were unsure of their stand as far as their capacity to manage the completion of the assigned tasks, curriculum recovery programmes and assessments tasks. What can be read from the above is the level of hopelessness that prevailed as principals were only capable of managing what was within their reach.

6.5 Areas of achievements in policy implementation

This section looks at the duties that were performed by the allocated staff and the manner in which the principals managed these duties. Principals showed an element of success in managing the daily routine tasks through the allocated personnel. Principals had to provide immediate task-oriented leadership to prepare and make schools ready to prevent the spread of infection by applying the policy guidelines [2, 11] The first priority was to set up COVID-19 Committees comprising staff members and to provide relevant training for them. This would then be followed by delegating duties as prescribed by the policy guidelines. Most of the tasks were, however, performed by personnel other than teachers. These were employed and trained specially to execute these special tasks. Nonetheless, it was the duty of the principal to monitor the performance of these duties. The table below indicates the levels of performance as observed by principals.

Table 3 indicates that the principals observed very high or high levels of performance in the execution of duties allocated to various personnel except for a few schools whose performance was low or very low.

	Levels of confidence
	Very high	High	Moderate	Low	Very low	Unsure
Screening of learners	13	12	4	—	1
Screening of teachers	14	13	2	1	—
Sanitisation of learners at entry points	15	12	3	—	—
Cleaning and sanitisation of classrooms	10	16	4	—	—
Handling of food by food handlers	12	12	3	1	—	2

Table 3.

Level of confidence with performance on COVID-19 activities.

Procedures that needed to be followed with great accuracy included how to isolate individuals suspected of infection, notification of relevant authorities and closing down of schools for decontamination. Out of the 12 schools that had to deal with reported positive cases, principals seemed to have followed protocol and handled cases in the best way that protected the schooling community.

Lethiwe Primary had a case with a learner and later a teacher. The learner was ‘placed in [an] isolation room’ while the principal called the parent—‘fetched by a parent’. The teacher was ‘asked to get immediate medical help’. The principal contacted the Circuit Manager and ‘phoned the nurse’. The school ‘followed directives from [the] Health Department’ and the school closed for 3 days to decontaminate. Bongisizwe also had multiple cases from learners at different times. The principal ‘contacted [the] parent to collect [the child] immediately’ and ‘phoned the Circuit Manager, [and] health [officials]’ and notified ‘school staff’. ‘The school closed for 3 days’. With a case in Grade 12, only the affected grade was closed. All other schools that experienced cases followed similar procedures.

That protocol was followed by principals may also be supported by data in Tables 1 and 3. Table 1 depicts the number of cases the schools experienced, the number of learners sent home and the number of teachers quarantined. Table 3 illustrates the principals’ levels of confidence related to the performance of the activities used as barriers to prevent the virus from infecting many individuals.

7. Discussion of the findings

The findings point to the difficulties that were faced by principals to ensure continuous teaching and learning despite the spatial arrangement to try to equitably share the classrooms through alternate attendance models. Principals had to make these compromises as a way of trying to balance the phasing in of the Grade R to Grade 6 learners in primary and Grades 8–11 learners in secondary level respectively. The other key finding from the data is that the limited infrastructure in under-resourced schools posed a risk of spreading the virus. These are contextual factors beyond the control of the principals. The policy guidelines compelled schools to have an isolation room or sick room for individuals with suspected infections. Of the schools participating in the study, it was only the well-resourced schools that had functional isolation rooms or sick rooms. Most under-resourced schools improvised by using available spaces for this purpose. Such adaptation is nevertheless in line with the argument that spaces may change depending on need, which means that certain activities and human conceptions determine the meanings and use of space [19, 20].

It is clear from the findings that teaching was negatively affected by the absence of teachers. Absent teachers leave behind gaps that may not be instantly or suitably filled by the principal. Added to that is the number of days in which some of the schools were closed for decontamination. Twelve schools closed for a combined total of 31 days ranging from 2 to 9 days for some of the schools. To respond to these challenges, some principals had mitigation strategies to make up for the lost time. The findings indicate the complexity of implementing the policy and the gaps that exist between the policy and the reality at the school level. The turbulent nature of the academic year indicated the level of challenges that principals faced in managing the implementation of the policy guidelines.

8. Conclusion

In this section, we draw conclusions and highlight implications for practice and research. As researchers, we acknowledge the fact that 30 out of 487 public schools is not a sufficiently large enough figure from which to draw general conclusions on how uMgungundlovu District managed the COVID-19 crisis in schools. We nevertheless conclude that there was a disjuncture between policy and implementation. Policymakers seem to have assumed that schools had capacities to implement all the ideas contained in the guidelines. However, the contexts of the schools are never the same, as some lack the financial and other resources to fully implement COVID-19 safety protocols. A one-size-fits-all approach does not work in the educational context. Although principals may have been determined to implement all the guidelines, the complex, turbulent and unprecedented nature of the pandemic made it difficult to have fully functional schools.

Some principals managed to salvage teaching and learning despite the challenges of juggling different grades and classes to allow for the sharing of space. Some of the failures were beyond the principals’ control, as teachers used their legal rights to apply for leave due to underlying comorbidities.

The added burden of managing the temporary closure of schools for decontamination negatively affected the number of days for teaching and learning. All the efforts that were made for curriculum recovery programmes could not be successful in a learning situation filled with fear and anxiety caused by the new infections. The recovery programmes were more of a sacrifice by the teachers putting in extra hours of work. We conclude that situational leadership was applied in areas where principals had a level of control. Where there was not much to be done principals allowed the situation to unfold and dealt with those areas within their control to ensure that the academic year was not totally lost. While this study aimed to understand the principals’ experiences, it also revealed the capabilities and readiness of schools as they maintained a delicate balance between providing education and fighting the virus. Evidence on various models of social distancing applied in schools has proved to be challenging as revealed by the findings. Research is thus required to develop methods of creating space to avoid close contact in schools without disruptions to curriculum delivery, especially in under-resourced schools within the South African context.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.