Change management and performance of public secondary schools in Siaya Sub-county, Kenya

Abstract

The current focus on change management practices in the Public sector has been significantly induced by new public management paradigm shift that places heavy emphasis on managing for results. This is an emerging issue particularly in public secondary schools. The purpose of this study was to relate public secondary schools with the practice of generally established change management best practices and how they influenced performance. The specific objectives of the study were to establish change management practices adopted by Public Secondary Schools in Siaya Sub County and to determine the influence of these change management practices on performance. The study population consisted of all the 38 Public Secondary Schools in Siaya Sub County which necessitated the adoption of a descriptive cross-sectional survey design and the school managers were to respond to questionnaire items designed to address aspects of best change management practices. The researcher wanted to find out the extent to which the schools practiced these virtues. The school managers stated that they moderately practiced aspects of planning, committed leadership, workforce alignment, stakeholder involvement and had defined governance structures in their institutions. However, the extents were varying from one school to the next. Multiple regressions were run using the change management practices dimensions established against performance dimensions of student enrollment, participation in co-curricular activities, KCSE achievement, financial management, and provision of teaching and learning resources and development of school infrastructure. The study found out that change management practices adopted by the institutions significantly influenced performance. The study recommends that there is need to break from status quo and bureaucratic inefficiency associated with public institutions and be ready to implement comprehensive change management practices to maximize on resource utilization our public educational institutions. The study would contribute towards broadening the knowledge base of various education sector stakeholders towards embracing change management best practices which are result based. Further research could be conducted to establish how other change management practices other than the ones mentioned could influence performance. A larger target population could also be studied to make the findings more representative.