With a focus on the Eastern Cape province, with its vast stretches of rural settlements and a few urban sprawls, high levels of social inequality manifesting along racial lines and communities ruled by patriarchy, changing its provincial educational system is a mammoth task. This study traces the efforts to set up an integrated Eastern Cape Department of Education and the national interventions introduced to assume responsibility for running it. The study is unique in its utilization of the ‘theory of change’ model and positions that theory in a local setting by examing the inherited socio-economic contexts, the reasons, conditions and paradigms behind the status quo, and by projecting what needs to be done to attain the objectives.