The prospects of fostering entrepreneurial praxes by school leadership at historically disadvantaged schools in the Sedibeng area

Abstract

This study departs from the notion that historically disadvantaged schools are in a position where they face many challenges regarding their education service delivery. Among other challenges, these schools experience a shortage of both educational and infrastructural resources. Consequently, the past number of years has seen these schools loosing learners to historically advantaged schools. Many of these schools, however, manage to produce good results and attain good reputations. They thus have high enrolments because they are seen as probable alternatives to their historically advantaged counterparts. In this study, schools are seen as learning organizations, open systems and as being influenced by resource dependency. This essentially implies that schools in their environments compete with other educational organizations for resources. Therefore historically disadvantaged schools can survive and attract the much needed resources for which they compete by embracing and fostering entrepreneurship customs. This means school environmental conditions that foster innovation, proactively and risk-taking and allows for ventures that position the school in a position of competitive advantage. The literature review exposes the nature of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial customs and the role of the principal in fostering the entrepreneurship praxes in historically disadvantaged schools. The empirical study found strong prospects of fostering entrepreneurial customs in historically disadvantaged schools. Emanating form this crucial finding, the study proposes a simple and ambitious strategy for promoting entrepreneurial customs at historically disadvantaged schools. The strategy proposes a process that involves entrepreneurship orientation of schools principal, a hands-on process that exposes principals to real entrepreneurial environments and a school level entrepreneurial implementation process that fosters entrepreneurship customs, creates a school entrepreneurship culture and promotes entrepreneurship leadership. The study therefore introduces the concept of entrepreneurship in school education and provides historically disadvantaged schools with a strategy for creating school cultures that are entrepreneurial.