Top Class

Introduction:

‘Top Class’ is an educational series, endorsed by the national Department of Education, to be broadcast on the Learning Channel, SABC1 every Wednesday morning from 13 February to 9 July 2008. The series reflects the situational contexts experienced in ten selected schools in five provinces: namely North West, Western Cape, Mpumalanga, Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal.

With one big foot planted firmly in the reality genre, the programme seeks in an entertaining way to make a difference to how these ten schools in South Africa are managed.  The programme promotes the effective and efficient management of South African schools. It does this by seeking and implementing the advice of some of the country’s best managers in South Africa’s biggest companies and sports organisations.

Schools are very much like big corporations in that they deal with many of the same challenges, but unlike those corporations, they do not usually have the financial means, the human and material capacity, the knowledge and skills to manage them as effectively as possible.

Most managers in the public schooling system have not been exposed to the dynamics of the various management and leadership disciplines as compared to their corporate counterparts. Such gaps in school management and leadership have the potential to negatively impact on  schools’ academic performance.

Method:

The Department of Education selected ten schools across South Africa to participate in the ‘Top Class’ programme The key criterion used in the selection of schools was that they were under-performing but had the potential to transform themselves radically for the better.

Each week the ‘Top Class’ team and a different top manager visited one of these schools to meet with representatives of the school communities namely: the School Governing Body, the principal, educators and learners to grapple with the issues they are experiencing and work with them to come up with a simple plan aimed at creating effective short-term and long-term solutions to improve the running of the school.

The crew revisited the school five weeks later to assess the progress that had been made. ‘Top Class’ will also revisit the school a year down the line to gauge how successful it has been at implementing the agreed-upon longer-term improvements.