Abstract
Despite more than three decades of democratic transition in South Africa, learner academic performance in many rural districts remains persistently poor. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Sekhukhune East District of Limpopo, where most schools continue to underperform, particularly in mathematics, while a few achieve notable success under similar conditions of poverty, rurality, and governance. This study investigates the factors that hinder or facilitate learner academic performance in the district, with a view to identifying sustainable strategies for improvement. Drawing on Fiedler’s contingency theory, which emphasises the significance of context in shaping outcomes, the research adopts a qualitative case study approach, combining semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis, and purposive sampling of both high- and low-performing schools. The analysis situates educational performance within the historical, socio-economic, political, and environmental realities of Sekhukhuneland, highlighting enduring legacies of apartheid-era Bantustan education and contemporary systemic challenges. Findings reveal a complex interplay of factors across seven thematic areas: curriculum transformation, flawed educator recruitment, departmental provisioning gaps, school leadership and management, socio-economic and political constraints, classroom-level pedagogical struggles, and the district-wide mathematics crisis. Crucially, the study demonstrates that strong leadership, effective resource use, and community engagement enable schools to succeed where others fail, even under equivalent structural constraints. The study advances several recommendations. First, poverty alleviation and food security must be foregrounded in any attempt to improve rural education. Second, teacher recruitment and professional development, particularly in mathematics, should be prioritised. Third, school leadership capacity requires urgent strengthening. Finally, curriculum transformation must move beyond rhetoric by integrating indigenous knowledge systems, developing African languages as languages of learning and teaching, and aligning educational content with both global challenges (e.g., climate change, pandemics, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution) and local realities. By contextualising learner performance within broader socio-political and historical structures, this thesis contributes to educational management scholarship and policy by proposing interventions that are both locally grounded and globally responsive. It calls for a holistic, context-sensitive, and decolonial approach to mitigating academic underperformance in rural South Africa.