Reception into headship

This part of the interview intended to discover the head teachers’ first experiences in office in terms of how they interpreted their reception by the learners, the teachers, parents and other stakeholders. The reception they received from the learners and teachers seemed to differ from the reception from the parents.

As noted earlier (table 5.3), the head teachers fell into various categories. There were those who were promoted in the schools where they had worked as deputy heads, others started new schools, and some were transferred to other existing schools. Some of the schools were experiencing their first female head teacher, while others had had previous female head teachers.

physical movement, as well as the change in official duties. They worked in familiar surroundings where they knew the teachers, the learners, the school management committee and the parents. The major challenge they experienced was resistance to new routines. Their styles of leadership were also compared to those of the previous head teachers. Eve was promoted within her school and she confirmed a fairly smooth transition.

‘We had always worked as a team in our school. I think that was one of the things that encouraged me to accept this position. I was familiar with the environment. I just stepped from one office into another. People took time, though, to take to anything new I tried introducing, but I still think it’s easier that way as opposed to moving to a new school’.

Only one participant among those promoted in their own schools, Damaris, had a totally different experience, and considered herself a very strong lady, having withstood the treatment she received as a new head teacher. She had got the promotion after her head teacher deserted his school. He left during a weekend and never came back to the school, which was situated in a remote area. The local education officer asked her to take over as acting head teacher, as the office debated the fate of the school. The environment in the school she had taught for four years, once as a deputy, suddenly became hostile. The learners were rude, and once they even attacked her physically. A scar is still visible on her forehead. She narrated her story as follows,

‘I came to school early one morning to find only the girls in the upper classes(standard four to eight).When I asked them where the boys were, I was told that they were having a meeting behind the classes. I decided to leave my handbag in the office before I went to check what they were doing. As I was closing the door to leave, they approached me with sticks and started shouting at me in the local language (I come from a different community). I believe God loves me - just then an elder, who was respected in the village, entered the school compound, and dared them to touch me again. In this community the young ones respect their elders, so they stopped. By then one boy had already hit me twice on the head and blood was oozing out. I don’t know what I would have done if the old man had not passed by’.

After the unfortunate incident, she was transferred to her current school, where she says she has been working very happily. She did not attribute the animosity against her in the last days of her stay in her former school to her being a woman. She strongly believed that it was the makings of a male teacher who had eyed the head teacher’s seat and wanted her out of the way. The experiences of the head teachers who started new schools were slightly different. Everything was new for them – a new environment, new teachers, new parents, and a new school culture to be set. Janet considered this a challenge on the one hand, but an advantage on the other hand, because there was nothing and no one to be compared to. All the stakeholders were eager to develop the new school, so they worked closely together. Janet appreciated the wealth of knowledge the teachers brought from their former schools. Together they started to shape a school culture. ‘I told the teachers that the new school was for each of us to build from

the experiences we had gathered from elsewhere. They were eager to cooperate’.

The participants reported a cooler reception from the parents, especially in their first days. Most of them felt that the parents, although they did not reject them outright, seemed skeptical at first, but accepted them with time. The skeptics were more pronounced in schools which had never had a female head teacher before, and where a former female head teacher was thought to have failed in the job. Lilian said that initially she continuously received parents in her office who came to ‘greet the new head’, and who had all kinds of advice on how they thought the school should be run.

‘One of them actually told me to my face that although he did not doubt my leadership, he thought that what the school needed was a strong male teacher to control the many lady teachers (the school had only two male teachers) in the school’.

In another instance, the patriarchal factor was evident in a parent’s reference to a female head teacher, as reported to the head teacher by another parent. On his way to school, when asked by another parent where he was going, he replied that he was going to the school to see those ‘women’. He used a derogatory term used for women in the local language to refer to the head teacher and her deputy, who is also a woman. This may imply that the parent perceived them as women first, before seeing them as school leaders.

Another head teacher reported that the area chief kept approaching the local education officer demanding a male head teacher, but the officer was adamant that he knew what he was doing when he sent the female head teacher to the school.

Although this initial seemingly negative response by parents was subtle, it negatively influenced the start of these head teachers’ work. Several of them admitted to having had the feeling that they needed to prove themselves in their work in order for them to be fully accepted. Most of them reported slowly feeling accepted as they continued interacting with the parents, and mastered their administrative duties. Kiamba’s (2008:8) assertion that traditionally public perception tended to favour men as better able than women to handle school leadership holds true where the experiences of the participants in this study are concerned (section 1.1). This notion also reflects the Social Role Theory (Gage, et al. 2004:36) (section 1.6) which explains how each gender becomes focused on whatever roles are available to them, based on the expectation of the society, thus influencing the society’s attitude and reception of women into leadership roles.