SCHOOL LEADERS' VIEWS OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF PROTESTER VIOLENCE ON SELECTED SOUTH AFRICAN SCHOOLS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The reputation of schools' status as 'safe spaces' is under threat in South Africa, both from within the school and also from outside the schools. While service delivery protests are traditionally recognised as affecting other day-to-day activities in communities, their impact is often left unaccounted for in relation to the right to education as professed in the South African constitution. This study sought to explore school leaders' lived experiences of the consequences of protester violence on selected South African schools using Urie Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory to discuss and explain the research phenomenon. Using a qualitative approach and underpinned by a phenomenological design, the data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 17 purposively sampled school principals at public schools in Umjindi Circuit under the Ehlanzeni district of the Mpumalanga Department of Education.The study found that violent protests severely disrupt schools through threats and assaults on staff and learners, vandalism, theft, and interruptions to teaching and assessment. These events led to absenteeism, academic decline, trauma requiring counselling or hospitalisation, and financial strain from repairing damage. Together, they destabilise schools as safe learning spaces. Practical responses include strengthening safety preparedness with clear procedures and local law enforcement support, providing accessible counselling, and adopting flexible catch-up and assessment measures. Building regular dialogue with parents and community leaders may also prevent grievances from escalating into school-based violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".