Breaking point: Reports shows nearly 60% of public school principals are ready to quit

Picture a public school principal’s desk at 9pm. The corridors are pitch black, and the students have long since gone home, but the office light is still burning. Underneath that fluorescent glow, you won’t find lesson plans or strategy notes on how to help a struggling grade. Instead, the desk is entirely buried under a mountain of compliance templates, duplicate financial spreadsheets and last-minute departmental reporting forms.

This is the modern reality of school leadership in South Africa, according to findings from The Governing Body Foundation’s (GBF) National Survey Report on the Administrative Load of Public-School Principals.

Based on responses from more than 300 principals at GBF member schools across multiple provinces and school contexts, the survey reveals that excessive administrative demands have become a systemic and unsustainable challenge in South Africa’s public schools.

The report highlights a growing concern that school leaders are spending increasing time on compliance requirements, reporting obligations, financial administration and management systems at the expense of educational leadership, curriculum oversight, staff support, learner engagement and school improvement.

A looming leadership exodus

The survey involving 305 principals from schools in the Western Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape, found that nearly 60% of participants indicated that administrative overload contributed significantly to thoughts of leaving their positions.

GBF CEO Marna Jordaan said that a potential mass exodus posed an immediate, structural threat to South African education, particularly around the loss of institutional memory. She noted that the principals most likely to exit first were the senior leaders aged between 60 and 65.

“If that happens, needless to say, the whole education landscape loses the principals who have the most experience and skills developed throughout the years. You do need people who can be the experienced ones to balance it out. In that sense, it can be a big dilemma,” Jordaan warned.

The survey numbers also reveal unsustainable working hours, with 84% of principals being forced to do administrative work after hours, and more than 40% sacrificing over nine hours a week outside normal school hours just to handle the paperwork. Ultimately, 71% report that these relentless compliance demands have a high or severe impact on their basic ability to run their schools.

Additionally, the survey highlights that the challenges are not limited to understaffed or underfunded schools. The Gauteng sample represents the wealthiest, largest public schools in the country, with 89% affluent Quintile 5 schools. Yet, despite having top-tier budgets and more administrative staff to hand work to, these principals recorded the lowest capacity-fit scores in South Africa.

Jordaan explained that this was essentially turning instructional leaders into clerical data capturers.

“It’s not the main function of a principal to spend so much time gathering data, putting forms, going to meetings,” she said.

One KwaZulu-Natal school principal, who spoke to Daily Maverick anonymously, explained that while paperwork was always part of the job, he used to easily balance it with teaching and running his campus. Today, an endless influx of meetings, compliance forms and reports has broken that equilibrium.

“There is a lot of duplication of information. I feel very disconnected from my staff and students. A lot of my time is spent behind a computer rather than engaging with people in the school,” he said.

The principal said that instead of acting as educational leaders, school principals were increasingly being forced into purely bureaucratic roles, warning that this shift directly crippled a leader’s situational awareness, hindering their ability to look up from their screens and identify the urgent “human and emotional needs of the school”.

“Right now, we are more focused on ticking boxes on forms and meeting deadlines because of the pressure we are under to meet those deadlines. I live in perpetual fear of missing deadlines,” he said.

Caught in the bureaucratic silos

The survey shows a sharp increase in administrative load over the past five years, a trend Jordaan said was potentially accelerated by post-Covid departmental data demands. Nationally, 92% of principals report their burden is higher or much higher today, and out of 305 respondents, only two reported any decrease.

Much of this daily strain stems from a disjointed bureaucratic pipeline stretching from the national department, down through provincial offices and local districts, to the schools at the very bottom, said Jordaan.

The direct consequence of this fragmented pipeline is relentless, duplicated data tracking. The survey explicitly identifies compliance reporting, financial administration and accountability tools as the most punishing areas of responsibility. Instead of utilising a centralised system, different departmental divisions operate in total silos, repeatedly hitting schools with the same queries.

In the Western Cape, an overwhelming 89% of principals cited this duplication of efforts as a primary pressure point, while in Gauteng, it tied as the top concern at 92%.

Jordaan illustrated this redundancy with a common classroom scenario. A principal might receive a directive today asking for basic learner demographics, only for a completely different division to demand the same numbers tomorrow with a minor query about bathroom facilities tacked on.

Compounding the repetition are highly unrealistic turnaround times. Principals frequently step into their offices to find urgent directives demanding complex data within hours. This reactivity defines the burden in the Eastern Cape, where an astonishing 100% of respondents cited “short notice for submission” as a major pressure factor, while 85% of Western Cape respondents cite short notice, and 80% cite unrealistic deadlines as major pressures.

“You step into your office, you have a full diary of what you want to do, and then within the first hour, your secretary comes in, and she says this just came from the district, they want this information, and they want it before 12 o’clock,” said Jordaan, who retired as a principal in 2024.

“They don’t give you instructions, and then they want it done within a few hours, but then they will also tell you today we want you to be somewhere tomorrow. That is the frustrating part”.

Rethinking school governance

To mitigate this operational strain, the GBF report outlines urgent system-level reforms, advocating for a “work smarter, not harder” approach where departments capture data once and share it internally across servers.

The foundation is also calling for a shift in how school governing bodies are trained to support school management teams.

The GBF has already submitted the survey findings to education authorities at both national and provincial levels, and early indications show that the message is registering.

Jordaan confirms that the foundation has received word from one or two regions indicating that education departments are starting to instruct districts to streamline their requests. Daily Maverick sent questions to the Department of Basic Education. At the time of publication, no response had been received. DM