Role of Leadership and Management as School Head: A Case Study of Bulawayo Government Secondary Schools in Zimbabwe

The study's main goal was to determine how any of the aforementioned abilities may increase productivity in government secondary schools. The purpose of the study was to investigate the kinds of abilities required for government secondary school heads to function effectively. Therefore, the study looked at whether school heads could be successful whether they used management skills, leadership abilities, or both. The investigation was conducted in Bulawayo's public secondary schools. The only metric utilized to assess schools' academic achievement was their O' level result. Sixty respondents were included in the sample, including heads of secondary schools, district authorities, and other important figures in the education system including BSPZ coordinators and recently hired secondary school inspectors. Document analysis, observation, interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data under the following themes: leadership skills and tasks, management skills and tasks and the concepts of change, motivation, school mission and vision, community involvement and teachers’ needs to finally come out with the head’s recommended attributes. The assessment of school administration revealed transformation in the task with institutions gradually moving away from concentrating on day-to-day neat management tasks towards focusing on a unique, situational designed and visionary approach to school management which requires more leadership qualities. Interviews of education officers revealed that, whilst all government schools were guided by government policy, policy was not meant to kill the individual flair of heads. The focus group discussions revealed that leadership was needed in education as an answer to the dynamic and turbulent environment. The discussions revealed that with the ever-changing times, it was the flexible leader who would be able to identify strategies that would take advantage of the changing environment; the strategies that would go in line with the globalization trends, who was needed by today’s school. Thus, most respondents believed that heads of schools could use leadership skills to create competitive advantage and uniqueness of schools, yet the issue of how policy could be successfully woven into heads’ plans remained debatable. The study therefore recommended that schools as business organizations needed leaders who clearly understood their role in the school production process.