Understanding school size, type, performance in the ranking of secondary schools in Lusaka province.

Abstract

This study aimed at understanding school type, school size, performance in the ranking of secondary schools in Lusaka province for the purpose of fair ranking of academic performance of schools. The study sought to explore the extent to which school type and size interaction, school type and school size relate with academic performance. This was with the view that factor(s) with significant relationship with academic performance be considered when ranking school academic performance in the province otherwise ranking not to be based on such factor(s). The study also compared academic performances of different school types (grant aided, private and public schools) and school sizes (small, medium and large schools). The study was informed by the theory of performance (TOP) by McGillivray Elger. The theory considers performance to be affected by altered and non-altered factors and that increase in performance is shown by some indicators. Mean school certificate pass for each of the school type and size were analysed. All the 58 secondary schools that wrote Grade twelve final examination in the period 2012 to 2016 were considered. To establish the extent of the relationship, a correlation design was engaged and data analysed using two way ANOVA in SPSS. To aid understanding on how exact school type and size influence academic performance, unstandardized coefficients were obtained using regression analysis. The results showed that school type and size interaction and school size had no significant relationship with academic performance while school type had. Best performance was observed in grant aided school and least in private school for school type. With school size, small schools showed best performance followed by medium and last were large schools. It was concluded that fair ranking of secondary schools in Lusaka province should be based on school type. The study made the following major recommendations among many others: a) Government to ensure that secondary schools in Lusaka province are of reasonable size. The population of each school should be within what was defined as small school in this research. Therefore, more schools should be built to achieve this. b) Schools of different sizes to be availed with resource and infrastructure proportionate to their sizes. c) Enrolment marks in all the types of schools to be regulated.