This paper aims to determine the extent to which Departmental Heads (DHs) encounter curriculum leadership challenges in influencing learner performance. DHs play an important role in ensuring teachers successfully implement the curriculum to attain improved learner performance. As curriculum leaders, it is their responsibility to supervise teachers by overseeing multiple subjects that fall within their various departments and to ensure teachers offer quality education whilst working towards attaining improved learner performance. Even though this might be the responsibility that might be linked to the principals, it is directly linked to the DHs as they work directly with the subject teachers, ensure departmental meetings are held, also monitor teachers’ performance. Even though all these responsibilities are linked with the DHs, and they even extend further to ensuring the availability of needed resources, there has not been much attention to curriculum leadership challenges that DHs are exposed to particularly in South Africa. This paper adopted sociocultural theory as it explains how cultural elements and social interaction affect personal growth, which in this context how a highlights how positive school culture that takes into consideration curriculum leadership challenges encountered by DHs can assist in their development. This paper adopted a quantitative research approach using a statistical descriptive research design which was underpinned by the pragmatism paradigm. Eighty (80) DHs were purposefully sampled and a closed ended questionnaire was used to collect data. Results emanating from the study revealed that majority of the DHs encounter curriculum leadership challenges to some extent. Based on these results, the study recommends the introduction of subject leaders to ensure subjects are overseen by teachers with speciality as that will also assist in reducing DHs’ workload. It is thus recommended that curriculum leadership must form the basis of continuous changes in the curriculum to ensure DHs fully understand their role as curriculum leaders in during continuous curriculum changes.

Keywords: Curriculum leadership, learner performance, curriculum, quality education.