township schools

While existing literature recognises mentorship as an important strategy for leadership development, there is limited empirical understanding of how women experience and negotiate mentorship as they advance into school leadership in the South African context. Despite policy efforts to promote gender equity, women remain underrepresented in school leadership, and the role of mentorship in addressing this disparity remains insufficiently understood. This study explores mentorship as a relational mechanism through which women negotiate access, leadership identity, and social capital in their advancement into school leadership. An interpretive qualitative design, underpinned by a narrative phenomenological approach and informed by Social Capital Theory, was used to explore the experiences of six purposively selected women leaders from township schools in a single district in KwaZulu-Natal. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews and were analysed thematically. Participants reported that supportive mentoring relationships provided them with confidence, professional visibility, networking opportunities, leadership guidance, and encouragement to pursue leadership positions. Participants with limited access to mentorship described feelings of isolation, reduced access to leadership guidance, and fewer opportunities for professional development. They also reported seeking mentorship through external professional networks and women-centered spaces when support within their immediate school environments was limited. Some participants described mentoring relationships characterised by unequal power dynamics, limited trust, or inappropriate behaviour. Based on these accounts, the researchers interpret mentorship as an uneven, relational, and context-dependent mechanism through which women negotiate access to professional resources, leadership identity, and social capital. The findings suggest that mentorship can facilitate women's leadership development when relationships are supportive and trusting, but may also constrain agency when mentoring relationships reproduce hierarchical and gendered power relations. The study, therefore, extends understanding of mentorship by shifting attention from the mere availability of mentors to the relational, institutional, and power conditions that shape how mentorship is experienced and mobilised. Although limited by its small, context-specific sample, the study provides contextually grounded insights into mentorship and women's advancement into school leadership. It highlights the need for structured, responsive, and gender-sensitive mentoring opportunities.

Allocation of educational resources affects the learning environment and equality of opportunity for students. Frontline teachers' views on the urban-rural disparity in educational resources for Chinese primary and secondary schools are investigated in this study. An exploratory comparative design was used, and based on questionnaire responses from 26 teachers, six were from urban schools and twenty were from rural or township schools. Teacher staffing and qualifications, school facilities, digital resources, curriculum implementation, professional development, family cooperation, funding and policy execution were also analysed. Therefore, the deficiencies in urban and rural areas cannot be confined to primary and secondary school facilities. Rural teachers reported more restrictions in specialist staffing, professional development, curriculum provision, digital resources, family support and the actual implementation of educational balancing policies. Teachers in both groups also listed the recruitment, training and retention of teachers as problems. Therefore, in addition to the supply of resources, schools need to have the ability to use and maintain these resources effectively for educational equity. Due to the small and unequal sample and the reliance on self-reported data, the findings should be interpreted as exploratory. Future research should use larger samples and combine teacher perspectives with student, school, and longitudinal data to further examine how resource allocation affects educational opportunities.