A Case for Adoption of Distributed Leadership Practices in Tackling School Violence

Abstract

In spite of government interventions and policy frameworks on school safety, the spate of school violence in South Africa remains unabated. Its consequences affect students, teachers and the wider community, a situation that has constituted a major concern to education stakeholders. In this article, we advanced Distributed Leadership Theory (DLT), as theorized by James Spillane, to address the heightened spate of school violence in schools. The conceptual article adopted a concept explication approach via the use of Conceptual Analysis (CA) to delineate the nuanced relationships between the tenets of DLT and school stakeholders’ roles in the development of an effective school-specific safety framework.  This we did by evaluating two of the existing frameworks vis a vis their deficiencies.  Specifically, we proposed a model that emphasises the fusion of the roles of school stakeholders from a leadership perspective and also advanced the core principles of distributed leadership theory to foster a safe school environment. This paper contributed to the literature on strategies for mitigating school violence via the adoption of the proposed model.