School culture as barometer of learners’ success: case study of Eastern Cape selected schools

The South African government attaches high priority on education hence a bigger share of the country’s budget is allocated to education. Literature presents a growing concern that South African public schools are not performing well with a number of contributing factors for learner poor performance. However, despite poor learner performance in some schools, there remain a number of schools who continuously produce pleasing results. It against this background that this paper sought to determine whether school culture has a contribution to Grade12 learners’ academic performance in selected secondary schools in the Eastern Cape Province. This paper used the Social Interactionist Theory (Mead, 1934) as it lenses, which seeks to understand events and circumstances around us and influence behaviour. This paper is located in the interpretivist paradigm and employed qualitative approach to gain experiences and opinions of participants on the influence of school culture 5 schools were sampled with 40 participants who responded through semi-structured interviews. Among the findings that emerged from the study was the critical participation of the stakeholders in school programmes, the vision and mission of the school to ensure learner success and maintenance of proud legacy of the school. The paper therefore, recommends cascading focus to the lower grades to continuously sustain school culture that enhances good learner performance. Key Words:organizational culture, school culture, school climate, academic performance, academic achievement