Improving Student Outcomes through School Management Committees: A Qualitative Case Study of Public Secondary Schools in Windhoek, Namibia

School Management Committees (SMCs) are pivotal to decentralised education governance, yet their empirical impact on student achievement in Namibia remains underexplored. This mixed-methods study investigates the contributions, challenges, and strategies of SMCs in three public secondary schools within the Windhoek District. A convergent parallel design was employed, integrating surveys from 200 respondents with in-depth interviews and document reviews. Quantitative descriptive statistics, analysed via SPSS, indicate that SMCs positively influence school governance, teaching quality, discipline, and infrastructure. However, these contributions are severely undermined by critical barriers: pervasive training deficiencies (M=3.45), community apathy (M=3.32), low member literacy (M=3.20), and principal-SMC friction (M=3.08). Notably, political interference exhibited high contextual variability (SD=1.415) and positive skew, necessitating differentiated interventions. The findings expose a stark policy-practice gap, revealing that foundational member competence is critically deficient. The study concludes that transforming SMCs into effective drivers of student outcomes requires mandatory capacity-building programmes, equitable resource distribution, and tiered administrative reforms tailored to specific school contexts.

School Management Committees (SMCs); student outcomes; participatory governance

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