The Governing Body Foundation (GBF) national report on the administrative load of public-school principals should be read as more than just another education survey. It is a distress signal from the people expected to hold our schools together. According to the report, 84% of principals routinely work after hours to keep up with administrative demands; 92% say the administrative load is higher or much higher than it was five years ago; 71% experience a negative impact on their ability to perform their core duties as school leaders, and 59% say the burden makes them seriously consider leaving their role.

A principal is the heartbeat of a school: the moment you enter the gates, you can feel whether leadership has built a culture of care, discipline and safety, and that culture ultimately drives the school’s performance and it influences young educators’ decision to enter or leave the profession. When nearly six out of ten school leaders are thinking of walking away, government should not ask for another report. It should ask what its own systems are doing to schools.

The most troubling finding is not simply that principals are busy. School leadership has always required long days and strong commitment. The troubling point is that so much of this time is now being consumed by paperwork, repeated reporting, evidence files, short-notice requests, duplicated information and compliance demands. Many principals are not working overtime because they are designing better teaching strategies, mentoring young teachers or engaging parents. They are working overtime to feed a bureaucracy that too often appears unable to distinguish between meaningful accountability and administrative noise.

Time is not an elastic resource. Every hour a principal spends completing another template is an hour not spent observing teaching, supporting staff, helping learners, solving safety concerns, strengthening school culture or planning improvement.

The question government must answer is therefore not whether schools have submitted the required documents. The real question is whether those documents have improved learning, leadership or service delivery. If they have not, then the system is not strengthening education; it is draining it.

This is managerialism at its most damaging. Managerialism is the belief that institutions can be improved through more targets, more plans, more reports, more monitoring and more measurable “evidence”.

It often enters public institutions wearing the respectable clothing of efficiency and accountability. But when taken too far, it produces the opposite: mistrust, duplication, fear, risk avoidance and compliance without learning. In education, managerialism slowly turns principals into clerks, teachers into data capturers, and departments into machines that demand proof of activity rather than evidence of impact.

There is a useful phrase for this: bureaucratic bluffing. The system looks busy. It produces files, dashboards, templates, signatures, plans and submissions. It creates the appearance of control. But the key question remains unanswered: where does all this administration lead? Is it read carefully? Is it used to give schools better support? Does it help departments allocate resources fairly and address needs during budget allocation? Does it identify risks sooner? Does it improve teaching and learning? Does it create a better future for our young people? Or does it merely move from one desk to another, creating the illusion that something important has been done?

A thick compliance file does not mean a school is improving. A signed plan does not mean a learner can read. A submitted report does not mean a teacher has been supported. A completed checklist does not mean fewer learners drop out. Government must stop confusing paperwork with performance. The visible existence of administration is not proof of value. In fact, excessive administration may be evidence of a system that has lost trust in its own professionals.

Let principals focus on what they were appointed to do: lead. The word “principal” comes from the Latin prīncipālis – “first in importance, chief, leader”. That is what they should be allowed to be. Accountability must sharpen focus, not scatter it. It should support leaders, not exhaust them. A principal sets the tone, shapes the culture, builds trust and drives performance – the very heartbeat of a school. If we want better schools, we must give principals the time and space to lead

The first leadership lesson from the GBF report is that accountability must be purposeful. Good leaders do not ask for information simply because they can. They ask for information because it will inform a decision, trigger support, reduce risk, improve learning or protect resources. If a reporting requirement cannot pass that test, it should be removed. Public institutions must adopt a simple discipline: no form without a purpose, no template without a user, no report without a decision, and no compliance demand without visible value.

The second leadership lesson is that trust is not the enemy of accountability; it is the foundation of high performance. Schools need clear goals, ethical governance, financial discipline and transparency. But they also need professional space. Leaders must be trusted to lead, not merely monitored to comply. Departments should spend less energy extracting evidence from schools and more energy asking what schools need to perform better. A system built only on suspicion will produce defensive compliance. A system built on intelligent trust will produce responsibility, initiative and improvement.

This lesson is not limited to schools. Municipalities, hospitals, universities and public entities experience the same pattern: more plans, more reports, more audits, more registers, more performance indicators and more short-notice information requests. Some reporting is necessary; public money requires public accountability.

But when compliance becomes excessive, duplicated and disconnected from service delivery, it becomes a tax on performance. It consumes the time of the very people expected to deliver results. Successful organisations increasingly understand this. High-performing institutions do not remove accountability; they simplify it. International examples such as Toyota, Haier and Buurtzorg show that organisations can improve performance by reducing unnecessary hierarchy, trusting frontline professionals and shifting decision-making closer to where the real work happens. This pattern extends beyond administrative overload.

Across government, warning signs are often documented in reports, research studies and advisory structures long before a crisis emerges, yet decisive action frequently comes only after the crisis has erupted. The xenophobic mobilisation that culminated in the 30 June march did not emerge overnight; South Africa has experienced repeated outbreaks of xenophobic violence since 2008, but many of the underlying causes remained inadequately addressed. Similarly, the frustrations that eventually exploded into the #FeesMustFall protests were evident for years before they reached a national tipping point. Collecting information is not the same as acting on it.

The GBF report should force a national conversation about the administrative burden placed on schools and public institutions. Government should audit every recurring report and ask three simple questions: Who reads this? What decision does it inform? What difference has it made? South Africa does not need less accountability; it needs better accountability.

• Prof. Linda du Plessis is senior deputy vice-chancellor of the North-West University (NWU).

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