The purpose of this study was to investigate how school principals understand HIV/AIDS and how their knowledge, attitude and interpretation filter in the implementation of the HIV policy in schools. The study comprises a literature review and empirical investigation. The results of this study can be used in planning and implementing HIV policy in schools. The data were collected by administering semi-structured interviews. Ten school principals from the Dennilton circuit in Southern Region of the Limpopo Province were interviewed. The results show that the majority of the principals involved in the study confirm that HIV/AIDS is an incurable disease caused by a virus and is mainly sexually transmitted. Some principals regard their school safe from HIV infection. Their assumption is based on the absence of HIV positive learners and educators in their schools. The principals are aware of the rights of HIV positive learners and educators. Significantly, the research findings indicate that the majority of schools lack educators with HIV/AIDS training, rules on safety precautions and first aid kits. It is recommended that ongoing HIV/AIDS training programmes be provided for educators to enable them to educate the youth on HIV/AIDS. Additionally, schools should focus on strategies to implement universal safety precautions against HIV transmission and to obtain first aid kits. Lastly, school principals should involve parents and other stakeholders in creating a positive school environment for HIV positive learners and educators.

This study explores how HIV-positive teachers within a specific social context understand, interpret and act on HIV and Life Skills policy. My aim was to illuminate the experiences of teachers living with AIDS and how their experiences affect the ways in which they understand and act on government policy. As a constructivist, I worked on the premise that people's experiences can best be understood by interacting with them and listening to them. I chose a narrative research design because it allowed me to explore and understand the perceptions and complexity of my research partners' experiences, and to faithfully present and represent the stories told by teachers living with AIDS. I used the data collected from the teachers' stories to write narratives that gave a first person account of the experiences of each teacher. To express my own voice in the text I created a column on the side of each page where I recorded my own experience of the process of the inquiry. I used inductive analysis in order to make sense of the field data. Rather than beginning with a theory, inductive analysis allowed me to expose the dominant and significant themes in the raw data without imposing preconceptions on the data. Three distinct themes emerged from the analysis, and formed my conceptualisation of the experiences of teachers living with AIDS: a) conflict between teacher as role model and ideal citizen, and teacher as an HIV-positive person: b) HIV illness and its impact on the body of the teacher: c) teachers as emotional actors. The main findings from the study suggest that in a context with AIDS there are limits to what education policy can achieve if it remains out of touch with a real world in which school is attended by children and teachers whose bodies are either infected or affected by the HIV virus. This is substantiated by the fact that while the HIV/AIDS policy is about bodies and about emotions, it is blind to the bodies and the emotions of those implementing it. I contend that it is this oversight that creates the wide gap between policy intentions and outcomes. Secondly the study highlights the uniqueness of HIV/AIDS education policy and its implementation which, unlike other education policies, powerfully brings to the fore the emotions of the implementers. I conclude the study by suggesting that the policy-making process be reconstructed to inscribe the real bodies and real emotions of the teachers into the policy, to shift from a purely prevention mode to one that looks at the whole prevention-to-care continuum and acknowledges that a significant majority of school pupils and teachers are infected and affected.

Given the context and prevalence of HIV/AIDS worldwide, this volume presents information, policy case studies, and empirical research for use by educators, policymakers, and organizations about the relationship between HIV/AIDS and education, including how HIV/AIDS has impacted education systems and the potential impact education has on HIV/AIDS.

The purpose of this study was to explore the views of principals and educators regarding the impact of HIV/AIDS in their schools; to identify the aspects of the National Policy related to HIV/AIDS that are relevant to the management of school-based HIV/AIDS policy in selected schools; to determine how school-based HIV/AIDS policy is implemented in those schools, to explore how principals and educators experience the management of the implementation of school-based HIV /AIDS policy; and to identify the challenges experienced by the principals and the educators as well as the strategies they use in implementing school-based HIV/AIDS policy. The main research question was: What are the experiences of principals and educators in the management of school-based HIV/AIDS policy implementation? The study focused on four high schools in the Klein Letaba Circuit in the district of Mopani in Limpopo Province. In order to investigate the experiences of educators and their views about present-day HIV/AIDS school-based policies and their implementation, the researcher used a qualitative research approach that is phenomenological in nature. The research design was a multi-site case study involving two participants from each of the four selected schools; a total of eight participants were involved in the study. Purposive sampling was used to select a principal and one Life Orientation educator from each of the schools. Semi-structured interviews and document analysis formed part of the data collection process. The findings of the study revealed that the management of school-based HIV/AIDS implementation is a challenge in schools in the Klein Letaba Circuit. The researcher found that HIV/AIDS impacts negatively on learners' abilities to attend school; on effective teaching and learning; the performance of learners; the behaviour of orphaned learners; and the responsibilities of educators. The study further revealed that schools included factors, such as discrimination, admission, voluntary testing, the exemption of compulsory school attendance for learners with ill-health and learner safety during sporting activities in their school-based policies. In terms of the implementation of school-based HIV/AIDS policy, the study revealed that all stakeholders need to know the contents of the policy, and be involved in its formulation and implementation. Life orientation and classroom rules support for affected learners and Health Advisory Committees may be used to communicate information about HIV/AIDS. The study also revealed that awareness; respect; trust; talking openly about HIV/AIDS; the involvement of the wider community in managing HIV/AIDS; and increasing the knowledge of educators on issue related to HIV/AIDS are strategies that work well in managing the implementation of HIV/AIDS policy. The study identified ignorance; denial; lack of awareness; and educators' extra workloads as challenges which hinder the effective implementation of a school-based HIV/AIDS policy.