Navigating a New Terrain: Exploring the Challenges Confronting Lesotho’s Novice Secondary School Principals

Secondary school principals in Lesotho are tasked with specific duties generally aimed at promoting potency while scaffolding the development of skills and socially acceptable attitudes among the youth. Principals are therefore expected to lead various activities in order to achieve sustainable learning environments. Despite the magnitude of their responsibilities, novice principals are often susceptible to various challenges and hurdles while carrying out these responsibilities. To unearth the school-based administrative challenges and issues confronting novice principals in Lesotho, this qualitative study employed narrative research design to capture their lived experiences. Social Justice (SJ) theory, as the main philosophical underpinning, and Organisational Socialisation (OS) theory as the secondary lens were adopted as theoretical stances for this study. Ten novice principals who were in the first two years of their appointment were purposively identified from secondary schools in the Maseru district. The selected principals were interviewed through semi-structured interviews. Using the inductive thematic data analysis approach, some of the findings revealed that some novice principals in Lesotho secondary schools are continually confronted with challenges that include teachers’ resistance to change, demoted principals’ animosity, and poor recording of school finances. The study recommends prompt processing and issuing of appointment letters and aligned salaries, induction of novice principals, training of school boards and transfer of demoted principals. The current study provides a novel contribution to literature by not only focusing on the key challenges confronting novice principals in Lesotho secondary schools as they sought to create sustainable learning environments but by further suggesting context-based remedies to the identified predicaments. Keywords: Challenges, Leadership, Novice Principals, Secondary Schools