A REFRESHING CHANGE?
By Julia Frielinghaus
Education Minister Naledi Pandor’s budget vote speech in Parliament recently was a refreshing presentation of her vision for education. Its focus on the valuing of excellence and the nurturing of talents (elements which tie in very closely with the DA’s vision of an Open Opportunity Society), has been sorely lacking from the educational agenda until now.
Moreover, whatever the failings of the current system, there are now more children in school, there is better funding for higher education, and a more rigorous process is under way to monitor the performance of schools, educators and learners.
But it would be a mistake not to look behind the gloss of the Minister’s rousing speech and consider the many glaring problems without solutions that remain.
We need, as the Minister stated, to “assert excellence and challenge mediocrity”. But she did not give us any detail about how schools should respond to learners whose problems are beyond the reach of schools, and educators who are not willing to play their part.
The DA has argued that we need to develop a formal and consistently applied system of interventions aimed at problematic learners, which would make provision, when everything else has been tried, to take learners out of ordinary schools and place them instead in schools aimed specifically at troubled children.
For educators, there is a desperate need to reinvigorate the system of school inspectors, now effectively defunct in many provinces, and tie non-performance to real consequences.
Although the Minister did not refer in her speech to the controversial plan she raised recently to punish school governing bodies for poor performance, this will become an issue later on in the year when the Education Laws Amendment Act comes before Parliament.
There is no doubt that school governing bodies need to be held accountable for failures to exercise their responsibilities. But at the same time, we need to recognise that governing bodies that do their jobs well should be left alone. We need a sophisticated approach to school governance, which recognises the enormous range of capacity in our country, and which leaves alone those schools which exercise their powers responsibly, but which demands accountability from those which do not.
There are no signs of such an approach in the new Education Laws Amendment Bill, which will place school governance almost exclusively in the hands of the Minister and her departmental officials. The DA has given notice that it will be opposing this legislation.
The attention on the poor performance of provincial departments is also very welcome. But again, there was a lack of detail about how this will be addressed. If we are to make our schools work better, we need to make provincial administrations work better too. This means more rigorous enforcement of the provisions of the Public Finance Management Act and it means an overhaul of human resources practices in many provinces, where it is clear, from the gross neglect highlighted by the Auditor-General, that competence and skills are not always at the top of the list of requirements for job applicants.
The Minister’s proposals for improving teacher performance also do not go far enough. The job boundaries for educators are too rigid. We should be looking at making the maximum use of the skills we have by, for example, allowing educators with specialised skills to divide their time between several schools so that their time is used to the maximum possible effect. We also need to look at the possibility of part-time posts, so that teaching stops being an all-or-nothing occupation.
Very few of South Africa’s young adults are in a position to reac
| Posted on 11/6/2007
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