A change management model for school managers

Abstract

Education in South Africa faces challenges relating to change management as a result of transformation. The introduction of various legislative and transformational policy initiatives pose numerous challenges for schools' change management processes. Apart from ensuring that change is implemented to achieve equity and redress of past imbalances, schools still have to ensure that education delivery takes place without interruptions. This requires school managers to possess not only change management skills, but engage and utilise change management models and approaches that ensure the success of school improvement and transformational change. This study presents a change management model for school managers. The focus of the study is on the nature of change management. The school is approached from a theoretical orientation that describes it as a social ecological system, which then requires a change management approach that recognises the ecological make-up of the school and thus focuses on the whole school change management processes. This implies creating school organisational conditions that are amenable to and promote change management efforts. The model proposed in this study namely, the Integrated Change Management Model (ICMM) focuses on essential elements of holistic change management at school level, which are, knowledge of fundamental aspects of change and knowledge of the change process itself and are manifested in aspects such as goal setting, organisation setting, training and education, promotion, sharing of success stories, incentives and rewards, diagnosis and monitoring and achievement of results, The ICMM brings a holistic dimension to change management. Its emphasis is on knowledge of the people side and the organisational side of change management. This is a critical aspect often overlooked by most change management models, which tend to focus on specific and particular aspects of organisational change management.