ISSN 2039-2117 (online) ISSN 2039-9340 (print) Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences MCSER Publishing, Rome-Italy Vol 5 No 23 November 2014 1445 Teachers’ Perceptions of Distributed Leadership Practice in Three Secondary Schools within Gauteng Province Kwinda Azwifarwi Aaron University of Johannesburg Pierre du Plessis University of Johannesburg pierredp@uj.ac.za Doi:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p1445 Abstract The post 1994 era brought many changes in South African Education System, including how schools should be governed henceforth. The South African Schools Act, no 96 of 1996 was enacted in the parliament and it challenged the schools to adopt a more inclusive and participative approach in running their affairs. But the school’s hierarchical structure remained mandatory and continues to exist even today. It is against this backdrop that this study was conducted to explore the practice of distributed leadership (within school’s hierarchical structure) from teacher-based perspective, rather than educational theorists or legislators’ point of view. The three sampled secondary schools fall within Johannesburg North District 10 in Gauteng Province. The research design followed a qualitative approach. The data was collected through interviewing the teachers of different post levels (including principals) from the three sampled secondary schools, as individuals and in pairs. To triangulate the data, documents containing minutes of the planning sessions and the first staff meeting were also requested and used to check how duties and responsibilities are allocated to staff members in these three schools. The findings revealed that there are possibilities provided by distributed leadership, and also inherent and inevitable barriers to a distributive approach to leadership in the three secondary schools. The possibilities are that distributing leadership can raise school’s collective capacities, empower staff, and can encourage collaborative school cultures and decision-making; and as a result schools can function effectively because of the presence of collective agency in the execution of tasks. However, the barriers posed by the school’s hierarchical structure and the policy climate within which schools operate, cannot simply be underestimated or ignored, and it is naïve to assume that they would simply fall away to accommodate and support distributed leadership in schools. Keywords: Distributed leadership, collective agency, teacher empowerment, and collaborative school culture and decision making. 1. Introduction Legislative changes in education took place in South Africa since 1994. For example the South African Schools Act, no. 96, 1996 was enacted in the parliament of the Republic of South Africa and it propagates how schools should be governed. It required schools to adopt a more participatory approach in running their affairs. In essence, this provided a landscape for distributed leadership to be practiced in schools. It is interesting to note that the bureaucratic practices in schools hasn’t been scraped out, and therefore principals still have the devolved powers; and they remain the chief accounting officers in schools which means that they are ultimately responsible for anything that goes wrong in the school. The schools sampled for this study were big, carrying about 800-1100 learners, with an average of 50 educators. It is obvious that within these schools, all the problems and activities cannot be handled by the principal alone, but a team of people can lead the schools efficiently towards success. Elmore (2000: 14) argues that in a knowledge-intensive enterprise like teaching and learning, there is no way to perform these complex tasks without widely distributing the responsibility for leadership among roles in the organization. This was the core focus of this study as it explored the distributed leadership practices in schools from a teacher- based perspective, rather than educational theorist or legislative point of view. Based on interviews with school managers (including principals) and post level one (PL1) teachers in the three sampled secondary schools falling under Johannesburg North District 10 within Gauteng province, this study examined their perceptions of distributed leadership practice. The findings revealed that distributing leadership roles provides possibilities of raising school’s collective capacities, empowering staff, and collaborative school cultures and decision-making can be created. However, there are