Geared up and readily moving is the Eastern Cape Department of Education's quality promotion and standards director under the directorship of Dr Sipho Lombo.
The directorate's main objectives are Standard Setting, Benchmarking and Designing Tools as it is a sub-directorate of Quality Promotion and Standards commonly known as Service Standards sub-directorate.
The team members of this group are Ivor Pitt the Chief Education Specialist (CES), with three Deputy Chief Education Specialists (DCES) namely Lawrence Peter, Rona Mdleleni and Vuyiswa Sandi who are supported by two administrative staff, Paloma Thompson and Pelo Dlutu.
This group's work cuts across all directorates at head office and all units in all 23 district Offices, monitoring the implementation of these service standards as set by the departments that include performance measure which is measurements and indicators of performance and levels of service delivery.
Apart from that, the directorate is also charged with the responsibility to ensure that the service delivery improvement plan of the department is compiled and is in line with specific measurable achievable realistic time bound principles and submitted to the Office of the Premier.
According to Deputy Chief Education Specialist, Lawrence Peter, the team also conducted a service standards surveys in 2009, subsequent to the pilot study conducted in 2008 and this time about 240 schools were sampled in 15 districts and the report is in final stage.
"Upon completion this report will be tabled to office of the MEC before being circulated to relevant education stakeholders", said Peter.
He added that this directorate is the custodians of the Balasela programme as part of its responsibility which is still a challenge in the department thus far as it has not yet been rolled out at all.
Additionally, he highlighted that the sampled schools were representative of metropolitan, cities, town, rural, urban and deep rural schools.
"We sampled districts from the included the western, central and eastern regions of the province, all three clusters, all quintiles, both section 20 and 21 schools and lastly fee and no fee schools," he added.
"One of our highlights last year 2009/10 financial year was the launch of service standards on 15 October 2009 which were signed by the MEC and relevant stakeholders," he stated.
Peter said that this year's focus is launching the service standards and helping the 11 outstanding districts that were not part of the process last year, in process mapping. The outstanding districts include; Butterworth, Cradock, Fort Beaufort, Grahamstown, Graaff Reinet, Dutywa, Ngcobo, Qumbu, Mt Fletcher, Mt Frere and Mthatha.
During the process mapping, Peter's directorate consult relevant directorate heads to ensure that standards are aligned with departmental function.
"The 2010 service standard survey will focus mainly on the learner attainment improvement strategy's master plan. We will sample 300 schools for process mapping and surveys in and we shall be focusing on those five pillars of the master plan which are the management and governance, national senior certificate implementation, school resourcing, integrated human resource development strategy and stakeholder mobilisation.
"We are doing all these in compliance with the Constitution chapter 10 (section 105 (1) is a replica of the Batho Pele principles, White Paper on Transformation of Public Service (1995), White Paper on Transforming Public Service Delivery (Batho Pele 1997), Public Service Regulations (2001) and the Promotion of Access Information Act (2000).
"The spinoffs for the department is that all the districts that we surveyed last year improved their grade 12 results hence this year we shall be focusing on underperforming schools and their feeder schools," concluded Peter.
Issued by: Department of Education, Eastern Cape Provincial Government
16 April 2010
Source: Department of Education, Eastern Cape Provincial Government
(http://www.ecdoe.gov.za/)
