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The purpose of the study was to probe whether the inclusive education practices at Early Childhood Development (ECD) adequately prepared learners for primary school. The study was conducted at a private primary school in Harare, Zimbabwe using a participatory action research design. Data were generated from interviews with key informants, participant and non-participant observations, as well as from document analyses. Our results showed that although the private school was open to inclusion and was well resourced for it, challenges emerged which were as a result of inadequate teacher training practices, and the lack of collaboration between the school and the parent ministry. It was also found that learners with severe learning disabilities were not adequately catered for. We concluded that there was a need for more support from government for inclusion to succeed. The teacher training colleges were not offering adequate practical modules to prepare teachers, and the schools could also do more to capacitate teachers for inclusion. The recommendations made should help the government and school administrators to improve the quality of early childhood education for learners with intellectual and learning disabilities.

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This study establishes the role of rural educational leadership in influencing societal behaviour, focusing Goromonzi District. It was positioned alongside the behavioural theories and the African unhu/ubuntu philosophy, informed by a qualitative case study. It made use of interviews, focus group discussions and observations in the generation of data from a purposive sample of three rural secondary schools. The rural context has its own set of unique community identifiers, making rural schools remarkably different from those found in the urban centres. The rural community is experiencing an influx of urban migration and as a result, the disturbance of an ideal rural setting is posing a challenge to the educational leadership in impacting the societal behaviour in the way it ought to be. Moreover, the educational leadership in the rural community is often characterised by lack of understanding of the rural communities’ traditional beliefs and practices, giving rise to contradictions with what the educational leadership intends to promote and encourage at times. Consequently, a cultural shift and contextual adaptation of distinctive attitudes and behaviours that enhance positive behaviour transformation becomes imperative. Above it all, studying rural behavioural trends as a response to educational leadership was paradoxical journey. The study thus, concludes that while literature points out that leadership has a direct influence of the behaviour of its community, this cannot go far unless the educational leadership deliberately aligns its own behaviour with the dictates of unhu/ubuntu philosophy which has a place in the African rural context.