Parents’ perceptions of education offered by secondary mission boarding schools in the Mutasa district of Manicaland, Zimbabwe

Mission boarding schools were built by Christian Missionaries, in collaboration with local communities, with the view to provide affordable and quality education to African children who were marginalized by the British Colonial system. In essence, the schools are jointly owned by the church and local communities. After independence, parents continued to prefer mission boarding schools, particularly for academic excellence, and moral standards, and to allow them to focus on employment and investment in the future. Over time, however, the education for all agenda led to the emergence of private schools, and the general population also accessed government and council-owned schools. The study sought to understand the perceptions of parents towards mission boarding schools in the Mutasa district of Manicaland, with a view of evaluate and perhaps, influencing corrective measures, towards continuing to provide competitive advantage on the market. Considering the novelty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers used an online questionnaire to collect both quantitative and qualitative data, which was shared with parents on school WhatsApp platforms, hence purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used. Permission was sought from the school authorities and Education Officials. The data was encoded into the Kobo toolbox and analyzed using SPSS and NVivo to produce results. Some of the data were posted to Data Wrapper for a more appealing graphical presentation. The findings were that parents are still satisfied with academic excellence but worry about dilapidated infrastructure, poor road network, failure to adopt blended learning, disjointed synergies with stakeholders, and misgovernance amongst other follies. The recommendations are for schools to reserve quotas for local students and ancillary staff, create sound synergies with stakeholders, have feedback platforms, improve school infrastructure and road network systems, adopt blended learning, and most importantly, respect that the schools are co-owned by the local communities and the church.