GENERAL INTRODUCTION (FOREWARD)

The ACE (School Leadership) programme is aimed at empowering school leaders to lead and manage schools effectively in a time of great change, challenge and opportunity.

In its final form this programme is aimed at School Management Team (SMT) members who aspire to become school principals as a stage in their professional career planning. However, we recognize that there are many serving principals who also need support at this time, therefore this field testing phase of the programme has been limited to serving principals. It is hoped that your engagement with this programme will benefit you by providing guidelines, insights and tools that you can use to meet your immediate challenges and needs as school leaders. At the same time, the programme and its future students will benefit from the feedback you give us based on your experience as serving school principals.

The programme seeks to provide structured learning opportunities that promote quality education in South African schools through the development of a corps of education leaders who apply critical understanding, values, knowledge and skills to school leadership and management within the vision of democratic transformation.

It seeks to empower/enable these educators to develop the skills, knowledge, and values needed to lead and manage schools effectively and contribute to improving the delivery of education across the school system.

The programme aims to achieve the following:

• Provide leadership and management to enable the school to give every learner quality education

• Provide professional leadership and management of the curriculum and thereby ensure that the schools provide quality teaching, learning and resources for improved standards of achievement for all learners

• Strengthen the professional role of principals

• Develop principals who are able to critically engage and be self-reflective practitioners

• Enable principals to manage their schools as learning organizations and instill values supporting transformation in the South African context

The ACE (School Leadership) is a programme that has been registered on the NQF at NQF Level 6 with an exit level at REQV14.

The programme has been built up from existing unit standards and like all registered qualifications has three components:

• Fundamental learning

• Elective learning

The programme will normally take two years of part-time study to complete.

Each component of the programme comprises a number of modules as summarized in the table on the following page.

Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) may be gained for one or both of the fundamental modules only, based on the requirements of the institution with which you are registered.

In order to gain the qualification, you will need to have:

• successfully passed or gained RPL for both fundamental modules

• successfully passed all six core modules

• successfully passed one or more elective modules

The programme is different from others in three main ways:

• learning principles

• assessment approach

• nature and orientation

The following learning principles underpin the teaching and assessment of the programme:

• Directed and self-directed learning in teams and clusters

• Site based learning (dependent on the content)

• Variety of learning strategies i.e. lectures, practice and research portfolios among others

• Parallel use throughout of individual and group contexts of learning

• Collaborative learning through interactive group activities e.g. simulations, debates

• Problem-focused deliberation and debate in group context

• Critical reflection on group processes, group effectiveness

• Critical reflection and reporting on personal growth and insights developed

• Research and experimentation

Depending on the institution and circumstances, the assessment strategy could include a variety of options to demonstrate and provide evidence of practice, based on the anticipated outcomes and against the assessment criteria. This could include activities such as case studies, problem solving assignments, practice in simulated and in real contexts, projects, written and oral presentations.

The assessment is focused on applied competence. The assessment evidence should include:

• Assignments and/or examinations, providing evidence of the ability to apply knowledge to practice

• Oral Presentations, which should be observed in context to observe ability to communicate with comprehension

• Two or more work based projects to demonstrate the application of the learning and insights from preferably the core modules

• A portfolio of practice evidence, which will support all modules

• Evidence of self-, peer-, tutor assessment as well as on-site verification of leadership and management competence.

As you work through the programme, you will keep a reflective journal and prepare a portfolio of evidence of your growth and achievements. This evidence will contribute towards your final summative assessment.

The programme is offered through a practice-based part-time mode so that you can work and learn at the same time. You will find that 50% of the work that you need to do for the programme comprises activities that you will plan, execute and evaluate at your school. By the time you have completed the programme, it should be possible to provide evidence that your participation has helped to change your school for the better.