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Schools in the rural context of Limpopo Province, South Africa have a plethora of challenges, which have a negative impact on learner achievement. This paper argues that for schools to triumph over the obstacles, effective school leaders are necessary. Such leaders must define and communicate a clear vision and mission and work with stakeholders to achieve them. With these assumptions, this paper explores how members of the school management team (SMT) of a rural school in the Limpopo Province define and communicate their school's vision and mission. Through the qualitative research method underpinned by the interpretive paradigm, a case research design was adopted and a single high school sampled to participate. Data were generated from semi-structured interviews with seven SMT members, a focus-group discussion with six teachers, and an observation of the research site. The findings revealed that most participants could not articulate the school's vision and mission. In addition, stakeholders were not involved in the processes of defining the vision and mission and communication methods in this regard were also ineffective. Lastly, the SMT viewed the vision and mission as fixed and did not review them. Based on these findings, I conclude that SMT members must understand that the vision and mission could serve more than a visual purpose when designed as guiding principles to direct smaller objectives within the organisation.

Academic advising is a proven high-impact practice, shown to have the potential to help increase students' prospects of academic success, increase their sense of belonging and integration at their institution of higher learning, and provide unique insights into the lived realities and experiences of higher education students. For this reason, advising can be seen as a transformative activity within the student support space in South African higher education institutions. As a practice and profession, advising has existed in the Global North (GN) for decades. However, in South Africa -- a developing country in the Global South (GS) -- academic advising remains a nascent field. Consequently, the overarching ideas that inform academic advising in the South African context (both theoretically and practically), tend to be drawn predominantly from the GN and more developed countries. The unchallenged acceptance and tacit dominance of theoretical perspectives and practices from these countries can be considered problematic. This is largely due to differences in the socioeconomic, cultural, and historical contexts of students attending university in GS countries like South Africa. This paper works towards developing a conceptual framework, informed by social realism, for analysing academic advising in GS contexts. It is the anticipated value of a GS framework for analysing the emergence of academic advising in South African and similar contexts that is the core contribution of the paper.

Could a transformative, inclusive and emancipatory educational framework like the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) advance academic success for all? Could racism and dis/ableism be dismantled through such an emerging educational trend that offers a redefinition of dis/ability abolishing oppressive pedagogical practices that perpetuate constructed views of special needs, often negatively correlated with racial and intellectual superiority? Could such a framework that foregrounds physical, cognitive and linguistic injustices advance achievement beyond merely meeting academic literacy standards within higher education settings like writing centres in a post-COVID 21st-century South Africa? These critical questions are some of the tensions raised in this paper proposing a compelling, yet controversial attempt at advancing student learning and achievement within an expanded definition of disability offered by the UDL framework developed by Rose and Meyer at the Center for Applied Special Technology at Harvard University. While COVID-19 centred around a pandemic, this global catastrophe accelerated the technological thrust into virtual and blended learning mediums of learning and engagement. Yet, given the technological explosion of the mid- and late 20th century, in many ways education have headed towards this direction. Now more than ever, the awareness of the Universal Design for Learning within the role of the writing centre and academic literacy is especially critical, given the drive for technologically driven approaches to address issues of social justice. This paper seeks to understand the obstacles and opportunities of the UDL framework within the role of writing centres in post-COVID 21st-century South African higher education. Through professional insights as a qualified practising writing consultant both locally in South Africa and in the United States, this reflective critique on the emerging vociferous dialogue around the adoption of the Universal Design for Learning framework at higher education institutions in South Africa, and its implications for the role of the writing centre, are based on this author's pragmatic, commonplace experiences as well as research studies conducted on UDL and the Harvard Review. It is hoped that this reflective paper may make visible some of the inherent juxtapositions Universal Design for Learning may hold for meeting individual students' learning needs principled on its universal approach to learning success for all, affording opportunities for further research and critique.

The academic success of first-year students' learning in science faculties is by no means assured, especially in an Open Distance Learning setting with its limited number of face-to-face encounters between students and lecturers or tutors. Therefore, such encounters should be highly efficient in view of the considerable amount of knowledge transfer to students. The University of South Africa (Unisa) makes provision for contact sessions of 15 hours per semester for selected modules in an attempt to elevate the pedagogical efficiency of these sessions by focusing on the threshold concepts as an innovative way of learning. This paper shows that tutorials adopting the threshold concepts approach have the potential to make students academically more successful. The focus of this study is an introductory information systems module that teaches the Python programming language. Our statistical analysis demonstrated that the year marks and final exam scores of the participating students were frequently higher than those of the students in the control group.

This article draws on a case study of six facilitators who were teaching Publishing Research in 2011 at one of the universities in South Africa. Publishing Research was offered by two campuses of this institution. This article gives these facilitators a voice and also identifies and defines the intended, implemented and attained learning outcomes for the module. The six facilitators claimed to be using the same learning outcomes in helping students to achieve the aims in the module but the results of the module tell different stories about the facilitators' awareness and achievement of the learning outcomes. Data collection occurred through document analysis and semi-structured interviews. A priori analysis theory (Samuel, 2009) was used as a framework for the study and this produced three themes, while this article itself is framed by Bloom's Taxonomies of learning. This article prioritises the alignment of the intended, implemented and attained learning outcomes; as well as the use of the three domains of Bloom's Taxonomies (cognitive, skills and value/attitude) in formulating learning outcomes of the module in order to contribute positively towards the well-being of the module.

Peer-assisted learning (PAL) is a long-standing educational concept in higher education (HE) and has been subjected to ongoing development and ultimate implementation into so-called 'high-risk' programmes. Substantial literature and evidence are available to confirm that PAL is an effective tool for unlocking active learning in medical education. This paper focusses on the effects of same-year/level PAL implementation on the academic performance of tutors and tutees in a health sciences' extended curriculum programme (ECP) at a University of Technology (UoT) in South Africa (SA). A retrospective, longitudinal and quantitative analysis of pre- and post-intervention results of three consecutive ECP student cohorts (2017-2019) was conducted to determine whether same-year/level PAL implementation enhanced academic performance. A total of 138 ECP students participated in this study and a statistically significant difference (p-value <0.05) was found with the overall comparison between the pre- and post-intervention results. Although not all ECP students benefited from this same-year/level PAL intervention, the findings of the study suggest that for the majority of ECP students, same-year/level PAL can be considered as an innovative educational intervention to improve academic success and preparedness for future studies.

Few high schools offer Information Technology (IT)) as a subject in South Africa. This paper used Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital to investigate the reasons why many public schools are shunning away from including IT in their curriculum. Data were collected using a questionnaire and analysed using ANOVA, to determine whether cultural capital influences choosing IT as one of the subjects in the school curriculum. The results showed that public high school principals view IT as a subject that should be done in schools where there is medium-to-high cultural capital status. It is a challenge for schools with low cultural capital to offer IT among their subjects as it is not practiced by the community or society in which the schools exist. The paper concludes by recommending that there is room for the so-called 'low cultural capital' schools to offer IT among their subjects despite the challenges they are facing. Cultural capital does not hinder students' performance. Students from low cultural capital communities can achieve good grades even though they learn under difficult circumstances of inadequate educational resources.

The PanAfrican Research Agenda on the Pedagogical Integration of information and communication technology (ICT; PanAf) research project was initiated in 2006 to support initiatives in African countries to integrate ICT into teaching and learning through the frequent collection and analysis of data on ICT usage. The article examines the congruence between the intended and implemented ICT curricula in six African countries (Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa) that participated in the study. Data obtained from the PanAf observatory (at www.observatoiretic.org) on these countries' use of ICT in education revealed that the national curricula documents (intended curricula) and teachers' classroom practices (implemented curricula) both emphasize ICT as the subject of learning rather than as a means of learning.

This paper explores the use of situated cognition theory to investigate how new academics learn to judge complex student performance in an academic department at a South African university. The analysis revealed the existence of two largely separate communities of practice within the department, one centred on the provision of undergraduate teaching and the other on the production of research. Newcomers follow a range of trajectories in the course of their identity construction as academics and their learning is strongly shaped by their histories and individual experiences of negotiating their way into and across these key communities of practice. Learning to assess student performance in an Honours research paper was found to be integrally linked to the process of gaining entry into the research community of practice with limited opportunity for legitimate peripheral participation given the high stakes context within which assessment decisions are made.

This paper aims to explore the pathways to mitigate challenges of learner academic (LAP) performance in a Grade 10 economics class in South Africa. The challenge of poor LAP has ushered a myriad of predicaments in schools globally. These predicaments include lack of teacher inclusion in decision making, inability to work cooperatively together, and lack of professional development opportunities geared towards LAP. The study was qualitative, with 15 participants chosen through purposeful sampling from one rural school in the Thabo-Mofutsanyane education district. This paper is couched in critical emancipatory research with emphasis on the emancipation of the teachers regarding pathways they can self-develop to mitigate the challenges of LAP. The focus group discussions were used to gather information regarding pathways to mitigate the challenges of LAP in schools. The study revealed that teachers possess a very equivocal and varying experience regarding the pathways to use to mitigate the challenges of LAP. The findings suggest that for successful implementation of pathways to mitigate the challenges of LAP, schools need to invest in training teachers for team-teaching and avail the necessary resources (both human and physical) to ensure effective quality teaching and learning exist in the school. The article recommends that schools should develop policy frameworks, together with relevant stakeholders, to guide novice teachers on the strategies they can use to mitigate the challenges of LAP in their classes.

A major focus of teaching and learning in undergraduate civil engineering is the enhancement of student performance. Feedback is vital for the improvement of students' performance. However, relatively few studies were conducted specifically to establish the relationship between feedback and student performance in engineering education, especially in civil engineering. Also, the impact of feedback on performance has not been explicitly measured in engineering education. The context of two undergraduate civil engineering subjects at a University of Technology (UoT) in South Africa was used in this study to examine whether feedback to students on their work enhances performance, to what extent it improves performance and what kinds of feedback are more influential. Case-study analyses of the performance of students were conducted and a perception survey was administered to the students, followed by relevant statistical analyses. Findings suggested that students' performance is likely to improve with structured and constructive feedback. Although both oral and structured written feedback were found independently statistically significant with enhanced students' performance, the combination of both oral and structured written feedback is most influential. This study contributes to establishing the relationship between feedback and student performance and the comparative impact of different types of feedback on student performance.

The aim of this paper is to examine the strategies used by peer facilitators in improving students' academic performance in a previously disadvantaged university in South Africa. It also assesses whether peer facilitators are succeeding in this quest. This paper stems from a larger study on the implementation of peer academic support programmes, which used the qualitative research approach and a sample of 31 participants made up of peer facilitators, students and programme coordinators. The study made use of in-depth interviews and focus group discussions as well as documentary analyses as methods of data collection. Data was analysed thematically using the main and sub themes that emerged from the data coding. The results indicate that peer facilitators use different strategies to engage students in an interactive manner in order to improve their academic performance. Some of these strategies include ethically acceptable discussions, questioning, and answering and redirecting questioning. The findings further show that these strategies are succeeding in improving students' academic performance to an extent. This is through improved pass rates and skill proficiency in various areas of academic learning. However, the participants reported that the strategies are not satisfactorily yielding the desired results because of certain impediments, which include the behaviour of some facilitators, poor relations between the Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) and various departments, and less individual attention paid to students by the peer facilitators, some of which raise ethical concerns. Consequently, these hinder satisfactory achievement of students' academic overall performance at the university. Among other recommendations, the Teaching and Learning Centre should forge better relations with departments to attract needy students for academic support, and there is need to ensure better preparation of peer facilitators with necessary acumen to guide students effectively.

This paper aims to explore the academic hurdles faced by undergraduate students at one university. Using the qualitative research approach, a sample of 31 participants made up of peer facilitators, undergraduate students and programme coordinators was purposefully selected. Data were collected using in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. The data were coded thematically to make sense of the experiences shared by the participants. The results indicated numerous academic challenges faced by first year students. These include problems of writing, referencing, plagiarism, English as a barrier and inability to use computers. It is concluded that students at the university under study face a myriad of academic challenges, due to poor socio-economic backgrounds and the low level of education which they received from the apartheid influenced system, which some schools still use. The paper recommends commitment on the part of stakeholders of peer academic support programmes.

The successful completion of a module measures student performance at tertiary institutions through ascertaining predetermined pass percentages. The lack of conceptualization of content by a student, may affect the students' academic achievement. This paper aimed to investigate students' perceptions on the factors that may impact Cost Accounting students' performance and determine if these factors have a significant association with a student's performance. The independent variables identified were attendance, age, gender, grade 12 results and language, whilst the dependent variable was academic performance in the Cost Accounting module. Using a sample of 180students registered for Cost Accounting II in their second year of study, the data collected from the questionnaires were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics. The study found that student attendance has a positive impact on student performance in the module. The findings of this study may be useful to higher education institutions and academics as it highlights the factors that influence students' academic achievement.

The development of 21st century competencies and skills in science teaching and learning is a key strategic imperative. Game-based learning platforms can be used to promote pedagogic innovation in various educational settings. Game-based applications such as Kahoot! have been increasingly used in education to facilitate meaningful enactment of formative assessment practices. Within the realm of science education, formative assessment is largely perceived as an assessment practice with pedagogic potential to enhance students' academic performance, motivation and engagement during the teaching and learning process. Kahoot! is an interactive game-based learning platform which can essentially be utilised to enhance students' academic performance, motivation and engagement in the classroom. This paper explores the role of Kahoot! as a formative assessment tool to enhance students' academic performance, motivation and engagement with a view to help students to achieve stipulated learning outcomes during remote teaching and learning in undergraduate Physical Sciences teacher education. The research study adopted a generic qualitative design and involved 21 purposively selected preservice Physical Sciences teachers at a South African university. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and the administration of qualitative user-generated online quizzes with the participants. The findings demonstrated that Kahoot! plays a significant role in enhancing students' academic performance, motivation and active engagement during remote teaching and learning. Theoretical implications for technology-enhanced teaching and learning are discussed.

South Africa's higher education system is falling far short of producing the mix of competent graduates required to meet the country's need for social and economic development. The problem of poor patterns of student success is longstanding, and is persisting despite the policy changes and many educationally sound interventions that have taken place in recent decades. This points to entrenched underlying obstacles, including but going beyond the legacy of apartheid, and indicates that they will not yield to supplementary or ad hoc improvement initiatives, however well-conceived individually. This paper is thus based on the proposition that there is a pressing need to design the South African university education system to focus unequivocally on student success and equity of outcomes. This implies, intentionally, that the current system is not designed around any clear commitment to student success. Correcting this must involve a re-prioritisation of goals in the higher education sector, aimed at ensuring that student success is accepted as the end goal of the educational mission of higher education. The paper argues that, if this is to be achieved, what is required is a sophisticated, realistic, coherent and comprehensive strategy for positive change. Given the nature of the higher education system, such a strategy must involve not only a clear vision of the scope of the changes and interventions needed to make a real difference to the performance patterns -- in terms of equity as well as overall outcomes -- but also an in-depth understanding of the responsibilities that must be taken by the key stakeholders and the underlying obstacles that must be addressed. The paper offers an outline of the major points of the argument, including the importance of applying design principles to any comprehensive response to the need to place student success at the heart of the higher education agenda.

In sub-Saharan Africa over 52 million children are living with the death of one or both parents. Drivers of this parental mortality include afflictions at levels endemic to the region, including: HIV; malaria and other parasites; lower respiratory infections; diarrhoeal illnesses; and road accidents, among others. This paper examines the impact of orphanhood on learning outcomes among girls and boys in sub-Saharan Africa, conditional on school enrolment. By analysing test scores for approximately 60,000 pupils in 12 countries, we estimate the effect on student test scores by comparing paternal, maternal, and double orphans to non-orphans in the sample, specifically for the subjects of reading, mathematics, and HIV-AIDS knowledge. No previous study has analysed how orphanhood might influence learning by using student test score data, making this paper's approach unique in the literature. This study employs two estimation techniques: Coarsened exact matching calculates the sample average treatment effect on the treated, while matching on students' family structure, household wealth, school resources, and geographic location; and double lasso (DL) regression applies applying machine-learning for variable selection with high-dimensional controls for regional and school identifiers, school location, and student age. Our results show both CEM and DL consistently report a significant negative impact of orphanhood on test scores among specific countries, especially those which faltered in addressing the HIV-AIDS crisis.

Promoting equal access to schools for researchers wishing to conduct educational research was one of the key tasks embedded in the educational transformation mandate of the new government of South Africa when it came to power in 1994. Drawing on data from five different research projects, this paper evaluates progress made by the democratic government of South Africa towards achieving that goal. Gaining access to schools to conduct classroom-based research was difficult and frustrating to researchers during the apartheid era. This paper finds that the government has succeeded in increasing access to schools and fair treatment of researchers who wish to conduct classroom-based research. This was achieved primarily through the government's nondiscriminatory policies and the pressure exerted by the issue of South Africa's poor performance in international learner achievement studies. The paper also finds that South Africa is still struggling to find effective strategies to address this issue.

Universities promote social justice by improving student success; a university degree is one of the most powerful tools to change the economic prospects of students, their families, and communities. For students to succeed, it is vital that they are connected to the wide range of support services in a meaningful way. Unfortunately, many students (especially first-generation students) find it difficult to connect to university environments that are complex and that are often not optimally coordinated. International and national research shows that academic advising plays a critical role in improving student engagement and success by facilitating better coordination and integration of support. Academic advising provides students with relevant information, facilitates their conceptual understanding of the university, and allows students the opportunity to form a meaningful relationship with the institution through an advisor and by means of various advising initiatives. This paper shares international perspectives on the critical importance of academic advising for student success. Building on these perspectives, we reflect on the development of academic advising in South Africa, and on its potential for enhancing student success in our context. We provide an institutional perspective by sharing the journey of the University of the Free State. In doing so, we show the positive impact of advising before and during the pandemic, and we conclude with lessons for the future of academic advising in the South African context.

Early post-apartheid policies envisaged a South African teacher who had autonomy to make professional judgements based on their school context and learners' needs. However, over the last decade, the state has increasingly monitored learner achievement and teachers' work. In this paper, we show how the professional development activities provided by the state for high school Life Sciences teachers focus primarily on measuring learner achievement and thus reflect organisational professionalism and managerial discourses which challenge the early post-apartheid vision of democratic professionalism. We present a case study of a cluster of Life Sciences teachers, generating data from interviews with eleven high school teachers and from observation of six professional development meetings. The findings show that the two main purposes of the activities in the cluster meetings are the improvement of learner results and the monitoring teachers' curriculum coverage and assessment practices. We argue that the discourse of performativity and managerial professionalism narrows the purpose of schooling, influences the nature of state-initiated professional development opportunities and also informs the way in which the state and teachers view their work. This contradicts the initial vision of the democratic state and provides insight into how neoliberal discourses have influenced education in a post-colonial country.

Peer-assisted learning (PAL) encompasses the active acquisition of knowledge and skills among students in similar social settings where teaching one another enables reciprocal learning. Same-year/ level PAL (SPAL) is applied in theoretical and clinical teaching across medical disciplines worldwide and is regarded as a teaching and learning strategy promoting self-directed learning. However, it is unclear if SPAL is supporting the academic progress and skills development of students placed on extended curriculum programmes (ECP) in health sciences education (HSE) effectively. This paper focuses on ECP tutors and tutees' experiences of SPAL on their academic, personal and professional development. Six qualitative, semi-structured group interviews were conducted with 41 ECP students (14 tutors and 27 tutees) after they had participated in SPAL sessions. Findings indicate that SPAL supports ECP students not only academically, but also improves graduate attributes and leadership development, and promotes adapting to higher education through the establishment of communities of learning. Embedding structured SPAL sessions into ECPs in HSE was found to be central to the success of this teaching and learning strategy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing advances were made by higher education institutions (HEIs) to support remote online teaching and learning for student success and access, which are increasing areas of research. The major objective of this paper is to address the shift to remote teaching and learning practices that COVID precipitated in higher education. We report on literature that captures the ongoing shift to remote teaching and learning practices. The response of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) to the crisis of the pandemic will be highlighted. Various themes related to the pedagogical value of emergency remote teaching (ERT), online learning, and continual post-pandemic support are discussed. We examine how challenges presented new opportunities for curriculum innovation and transformation at the UWC. The focus is the importance of a continual professional academic support structure and post-COVID awareness campaigns in order to sustain fully online and hybrid teaching and learning approaches. Recommendations highlight that departments across faculties need to focus on training and support with regard to the attainment and effective application of eSkills and eTools; and that there is a need to intensify this, especially as part of the broader curriculum transformation agenda. More research that focuses on ongoing advances in the support of remote online teaching and learning for student success and access during a pandemic is necessary.

This paper provides an overview of the various data sets pertaining to education in South Africa that are informing or could inform policy making in education. The paper serves as an inventory for anyone interested in understanding what data is available, how it may be accessed, what the quality of the data is, and in what formats it may be accessed. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part provides a description of existing education data sets and the basic data elements contained in each of these data sets. When discussing each of the existing education data sets, the paper addresses the quality of the education data available in South Africa. The first part also refers to the policy implications and the important role that data plays in policy formulation. No information system on its own is comprehensive enough to provide all the information needed in strategic decision-making. Hence, part two of this paper discusses the need for data integration as an important data management strategy. The third part examines the effectiveness of implementing a learner unit record system nationally in comparison with the EMIS system that is currently in place and that is based on aggregate or summary institution-level data.

In order to understand how students from low-income rural backgrounds in South Africa experience higher education and the opportunities and obstacles they encounter, the paper draws on two waves of interviews with 30 students currently studying at three large urban universities. Using concepts of capabilities and functionings, monetary resources and 'capitals', the paper outlines common factors which shape rural students' well-being and their agency in accessing an urban university. Student voices indicate the particular importance of being able to exercise the functioning of navigating and manoeuvring through unfamiliar and often intimidating institutions. The discussion also indicates that it is the intersection of rurality and low income which shapes, even if it does not over-determine, their lives at university. It is suggested that universities could do more to support these students' well-being, and to recognise the agency and admirable determination which students bring to the challenges they face.

Globally, there is agreement that school-community partnerships are one of the mechanisms to address challenges that schools cannot address alone. However, evidence suggests that where school-community partnerships have been initiated, their functionality and continuity is not always easy to achieve, and research locally and internationally has not sufficiently addressed this concern. To bridge this gap, guided by Epstein's theory of overlapping spheres of influence, this paper examined what makes school-community partnerships functional and sustainable. The research used a qualitative case study and employed discursive oriented interviews (both individual and focus group), a researcher's reflective journal, and document reviews to generate the data. Participants were principals, teachers, and academics from two universities. It was found that for partnerships to be functional and sustainable there is a need to ensure that there is collaborative planning and decision-making, effective two-way communication, eagerness to address power issues, and the creation of a culture that promotes participative leadership. From these findings, the paper concludes that principal's leadership is only critical at the beginning stage of partnerships, and teacher leadership is central in the functionality and continuity of partnerships. In relation to the theoretical framework, it is further concluded that power is an important element to consider, which either brings partners together or pushes them apart.

This paper explores the argument that to widen participation in higher education, educational institutions should bear a greater responsibility for students' learning. Central to this debate is the notion of 'academic support'. There are many perspectives on what works to scaffold student participation and learning but rarely are the perspectives of those receiving support taken into account. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory ethnographic study in which students in a vocational college in South Africa reflected on the nature of academic support and access to it. Student narratives that underpin their understandings of how the support system 'worked', and what responsibilities they and the college respectively bore for their studies, are compared to the official prescript on student support services in South Africa -- the so-called 'Student Support Services Manual' which was developed by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). The data indicate sharp incongruences in thinking. While the student support services manual maintains that students are a product of their disadvantaged contexts and therefore require an institutional form of academic support, students themselves placed much less responsibility for the provision of academic support on the colleges. Instead, they attributed their success or failure to 'character' and their own dispositions towards learning. This is an unexpected finding in the context of an often highly charged debate on the factors that constrain learning and learning outcomes. This paper argues that it is this 'locus of control' that undermines the idea that student success is dependent on prescription alone.

This paper compares the mixed-methods evaluation findings of the ukuFUNda Virtual School (UVS) with evaluations of three different mobile learning (m-learning) programmes in Africa: the information and communication technologies for rural education (ICT4RED); the Kenya Primary Math and Reading (PRIMR) study and the Nokia Mobile Mathematics (MoMath) evaluation. The comparison applies a conceptual model based on m-learning affordances and configurations (Strigel & Pouezevara, 2012), as well as on uptake, use, and responses by program beneficiaries; and on stakeholder learning. The findings show varied successes across all four programs and highlight important lessons for stakeholders with particular reference to scaling up of m-learning interventions in an African context.

One of the reasons attributed to the continuous decline in student performance and low educational outcomes in public schools is the poor leadership displayed by many principals. Despite the fact that there are no stringent criteria for the appointment of school principals or prerequisite qualifications, principals do have the potential to lead and manage efficient and successful schools. In this paper, I argue that principals can develop exemplary leadership practices when subjected to sound training and professional development programmes. The Department of Education and Higher Education institutions have emphasised the importance of formal qualifications for enhancing career development programmes for practicing and aspiring principals in South Africa. Using questionnaires, I explore the perceptions of teachers and school management team (SMT) members of the leadership qualities exhibited by principals who acquired the professional qualification referred to as the Advanced Certificate in Education: School Leadership and Management (ACESLM). Findings revealed that leadership development for principals is crucial for school improvement because of active teaching and learning. Leadership capacity requires principals to participate with relevant stakeholders skilfully, and where there is high leadership capacity, instructional leadership develops into sound leadership practices.

In this article we argue for a socio-political conception of space in order to show how conceptualisations of space can provide conceptual tools in the reframing of policy and designing of policy interventions in pursuit of higher education transformation goals. In keeping with Lefebvre and others, we conceptualise space as a co-producer of social relations with agentic capability in the transformation of higher education. Using this understanding of space as a conceptual framework, we analyse four national cornerstone policy documents on higher education transformation in South Africa. We find that space is almost consistently conceived of only as an object in transformation -- be it with respect to macro policy on mergers to reconfigure the apartheid spatial landscape of higher education, or with respect to discriminatory institutional cultures and the need to create secure and safe campus environments. Since the landmark White Paper on Higher Education of 1997, it is only the most recent policy document we analyse, the Draft National Plan for Post-school Education and Training of 2017, which blurs the lines between the social ills affecting higher education, the student experience and student academic performance, and different functions of space. We conclude by introducing the conceptual tool of spatial types as an opening gambit for a research agenda that aims to explore the organisation of space in higher education institutions to identify the underlying rules that govern their social nature and promote conceptualisations of social space in the reframing and design of policy that respond to calls for the creation of transformed and 'decolonised' higher education, as heard in student movement campaigns in 2015/16.

This paper describes a process to develop and trial new metrics in South Africa to quantify school leadership and management practices or processes that are considered theoretically related to literacy outcomes. The predictive validity of these measures is assessed in challenging contexts, including 60 township and rural primary schools in South Africa. We observe a randomness to how better leadership and management practices are distributed across better and worse performing schools. Regression analyses confirm weak and inconsistent linkages between measured leadership and management dimensions and literacy outcomes across the sample. However, we find evidence of stronger linkages with intermediate outcomes, including monitoring curriculum coverage. This research contributes to a burgeoning, yet underdeveloped literature on educational management and leadership in Africa and the challenges of measurement in this context.

The role of circuit managers is an essential component of school district leadership, which provides a necessary bridge between schools and government. School districts play a vital role in continuously collaborating, guiding and leading, and challenging schools to raise standards. In this paper, we draw on a subset of semi-structured interviews with education leaders in the Eastern Cape province, on their perspectives on the circuit management role. From these interviews, circuit managers were labelled as the 'weakest link' in the educational leadership chain. We explore the cause, nature and the extent to which circuit managers are perceived to be the weakest link and the implications thereof. Our discussion engages various factors that lead to Circuit Managers being considered the weakest link in the education leadership chain and these include: poor circuit office structure, the high vacancy rate of Circuit Managers, and external interference. We argue for the strengthening of the Circuit Offices and suggest ways in which they could be utilised to add more value in the efforts to improve the quality of basic education in the public schools.

This paper explores differences in access to technology and configuration of preferences for learning environments among design students in two universities of technology in South Africa (ISA) and Ghana (IG). Laptops and Smartphones ownership influenced and supported design students' learning. In IG, there was a 97% Laptop ownership as against 69% in ISA. IG does not have computer laboratories; hence Laptop ownership is a prerequirement for Design programs. Oppositely, ISA has fourteen computer laboratories for Design programs. There is no statistically significant difference between male and female design students in their choice of learning environments for academic success. Design students are not enthusiastic about accessing library resources via handheld devices. Towards academic success, students ranked low, their institutions' Learning Management Systems. We recommend a blended approach when designing learning environments for Design Education, while promoting the use of media platforms for content management due to device ownership among students.

The widening of access into higher education institutions in South Africa has rapidly transformed the student population to become more diverse. Students vary in age, race, culture, backgrounds, educational experiences, academic potential and university expectations. Widening university access with the commensurate need for success requires intervention mechanisms to ensure university management addresses student challenges, especially at first-year undergraduate level. Access and success cannot be achieved without understanding students' university expectations and experiences, as these are critical factors that are integrated with retention and success. This paper examines the gap between students' expectation and experience and argues that the intensity of such a gap can negatively impact the goal of achieving access and success amongst students from diverse backgrounds. The study utilised a pre- and post-survey to collect quantitative data from 95 first-year teacher education students at a university of technology in South Africa. The results indicate that there is a significant gap between students' expectations and their actual university experience with regard to the following indicators: social engagement, academic engagement and seeking academic support. It is posited that such a mismatch between students' university expectations and experience can result in students feeling disconnected to the institution, which could lead to academic failure and high drop-out rates. This study recommends that an intentionally planned first-year experience programme is required to entrench a more inclusive and sustainable first-year experience for 'all students' which could close the gap between students' expectation and experience and access and success.

Education is at the core of South Africa's national development. The National Development Plan recognizes the potential of education to transform individuals and drive attainment of other development goals. The country's higher education system is characterized by low participation and high attrition. This presents challenges for the attainment of targets set by the NDP. A number of Open Education Resources initiatives implemented around the world have shown that, when combined with Open Educational Practices, such approaches have potential to address some of the challenges facing the South African higher education sector. This paper explores these initiatives and elements that would need to be considered to ensure an environment that is conducive to their sustainable adoption.