The Role of School Management Teams in Managing Curriculum Delivery During and After COVID-19

Introduction

This chapter aims to describe the roles and responsibilities of School Management Teams (SMTs) in managing curriculum delivery from school to school to address the needs of a diverse community of students during and after the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. The authors recommend that SMTs, teachers, students, and all stakeholders should embrace the transition of curriculum delivery. Notwithstanding the COVID-19 crisis experienced in teaching and learning, SMTs should continue with their management role to deliver the curriculum to promote quality education. It is essential to monitor curriculum delivery during and after COVID-19 to ensure the quality of teaching and learning, especially in times like this when the regular curriculum is disrupted (Crawford et al., 2020). The execution of the curriculum has changed as a result of COVID-19, because social distancing is used to prevent disease transmission. Burgess and Sievertsen (2020), consequently, teaching and learning are going online on an untried and unparalleled scale. All this is taking place to ensure continuity of teaching and learning because students support that they should not waste the academic year by not being taught. E-learning systems and teaching and studying online is the approach to use in schools.

However, South African public schools are still using more traditional face-to-face learning than e-learning systems. Nonetheless, private schools can afford blended teaching. Biggs, Dingsdag, and Roos (2008) demonstrated that SMTs must then include guidance for the new arrangement, the program design, implementation, assessment, and management. Management of the curriculum is also one of SMT's managerial duties (Ntuli, 2018). This is required to improve high-quality instruction and promote the successful implementation of teaching and learning in schools. However, robust's responsibility for teaching and learning and transparency can be shared by top government structures, SMTs, teachers, students, parents, or all stakeholders. Ntuli (2018) has shown that the primary duty of SMTs is to ensure that the process of preparing, coordinating, directing, and managing the work of members of the organisation is carried out and using all operational tools available to accomplish specified organisational objectives. Another primary duty of SMTs is to ensure that the delivery of the curriculum is productive by establishing and achieving targets through the application of the following five essential management functions: preparing, coordinating, staffing, directing, and managing the use of human, financial and material resources. The curriculum management strategy is intended to facilitate learning by directing the instructional activities that guarantee lifetime learning readiness in schools. This chapter aims to examine the roles of SMTs in managing curriculum delivery during and after COVID-19.