Abstract

BLOSE, Sibonelo  and  KHUZWAYO, Ndumiso Quincy. Multi-domain examination of school decline causality: A narrative inquiry into stakeholders. Journal of Education [online]. 2025, n.100, pp.23-42. ISSN 2520-9868.  https://doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i100a02.

The Department of Basic Education in South Africa continually strives to improve the quality of education it provides to learners in public schools. One of the primary yardsticks used to gauge the department's progress in providing quality education is the matriculation examination results. While many schools across different contexts have shown improvements in matriculation results, there are still pockets of schools that appear to be on a backward trajectory. This paper reports on a study that focused on these schools in one of KwaZulu-Natal's townships to understand the causality of their decline. Critical realism constituted the theoretical framework through which we understood the causes of school decline. The narrative inquiry, a qualitative way of studying human life, was adopted to engage narratively with the lived experiences of key stakeholders in declining schools. The findings revealed several mechanisms indicating a paralysis of the structure, culture, and agency domains of the sampled schools

Keywords : agency; culture; leadership; learner academic performance; narrative inquiry; school decline; school stakeholders; structure.

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