Abstract
M.A. (Development Studies)
The capacity of rural schools to improve learner performance has been questioned when the National Senior Certificate (NSC) results are released. Popular to general consensus coupled with scholar findings, rural schools’ poor performance has been largely attributed to lack of adequate resources including infrastructure and well equipped staff members including stakeholders. Although the African National Congress (ANC) government is determined to lead the country to a developmental state model its’ efforts to equip schools with the necessary yet expensive demands of quality education has come up short, which has led to the private sector intervening in the education system. With the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) stepping in to bridge the disparities between rural and urban schools, the theory of neoliberalism and issues of hegemony, class struggle and access to quality education also come into contention. Which thus leads to the research question; investigating the impact of NGO intervention programs in rural education in relation to matric results. The study was carried out in Bushbuckridge and areas around the district. Five schools were selected for this study and a total of 27 respondents’ participated in this research. The population consisted of Teacher Union (TU) representatives, school principals, circuit managers, School Management Teams (SMT) members, NGO representatives and School Governing Body (SGB) members. Semi-structured interviews and observations were used as the data collection methods in this study. From the findings obtained, it can be concluded that different stakeholders play a part in contributing to a school’s performance. Government intervention programs contribute indirectly to a school’s performance whilst the school and NGOs’ intervention strategies have a direct effect on a school’s performance. For the recommendations, the government should collaborate with NGOs’ in order to put an end to perpetuating disparities in rural schools and it will improve learner performance if the school has adequate material.