Your Royal Highness, Nkosi Ndevu;
MEC for Local Government and Traditional Affairs, Mr Qhoboshiyane;
MEC for Education, Mr Makupula;
District Directors;
school governing board (SGB) representatives;
Teacher Union representatives;
Partners in education;
Educators and learners;
Distinguished guests;
Ladies and gentlemen.
Accept once more my humble greetings to you all. I can’t express sufficiently my deepest gratitude and relief that you have taken it upon yourselves to act in unity on the state of education in the Mount Frere District. I endeavour always to get all hands on deck to improve the quality of education we give to the children of South Africa, particularly the poorest of the poor.
The Eastern Cape Province, and now Limpopo, are major areas of concern given their placement under Section 100 1(b) of the Constitution, a development asking for intervention by national government.
You would all be aware of those serious challenges of capacity that gave rise inevitably to the need for such an intervention, challenging as it may be. As you well know, those burning issues that mobilised Cabinet in March 2011 to take steps, after full consultation, swiftly to bring the Eastern Cape Department of Education on track, included:
- Over-expenditure of the budget for compensation of employees;
- Failure to provide textbooks and stationery to Section 20 schools;
- Suspension of the scholar transport programme due to over-spending;
- Termination of the school nutrition programme; and
- Inability to effectively implement the school infrastructure development programme.
This has resulted in funding earmarked for school infrastructure being returned to the National Treasury, although the province is faced with serious infrastructural backlogs.
Cabinet’s aim was and remains to help the province in creating an enabling environment conducive for efficient and effective delivery of educational services in the Province. It had the blessing of Parliament and the National Council of Provinces.
When we performed our school analysis of the 2011 national exams, we said it is essential to make the school environment conducive for learning. More importantly, our people in rural communities are the most hard-hit by the legacy of apartheid with its triple sins of inequality, joblessness and poverty.
Whatever we do here affects lives of children in 256 schools in the district, that is, 230 primary schools and 26 secondary schools. That’s how serious this two-day Mount Frere intervention is.
You were spot-on to take as a starting-point the performance of the Class of 2011 in the Mount Frere District. Matric results rank among the important indicators of performance of the schooling system. Much needs to be done to turn education around. We must therefore be bold and grasp the nettle.
But we can’t do this with any success without communities. This simply cannot be done without traditional leadership, without trade unions, without business, inter-faith communities, NGOs or without educators, parents, learners and the whole of civil society. Success depends on the involvement of all of us. Government cannot educate the people without the people.
Indeed you were right to say education in this district and in this province has no choice but to turn the tide more so because we have set the bar much higher for all provinces for 2012. Accordingly, all districts and all schools are expected to perform at the national average of 70%.
You know in 2011 the Eastern Cape was the worst performing province with a pass rate of 58.1%, even down from 58.3% of 2010, a further decline of 0.2%. Of the 65 359 learners who wrote matric in this province, only 37 997 achieved a pass, of these, only 10 291 (15.7%) qualified for bachelors studies.
The five poorest performing districts, which are all in the Eastern Cape, are: Butterworth, Fort Beaufort, Libode, Sterkspruit and Mount Frere. In fact Mount Frere is one of the consistently poor performing districts in the country with Grade 12 results for the past 3 years showing slight improvement and a decline in 2011. The average for the past four years is 45%.
There is a link between performance in matric exams and the Annual National Assessments (ANA). In the case of ANA, in Grade 3 for literacy Mount Frere got a mean average of 41.44 and for numeracy 41.98. For Grade 6, the district managed only 31.23 for language and 25.50 for Maths.
Our officials have reported that the district did not make schools analyse ANA results as required to get a better grasp of what are the problems and what needs to be done to solve them. Circuit managers and subject advisors did not do item analysis of learner scripts except working with averages only.
When we announced the 2011 matric results, we said we will send teams to assist underperforming districts. Out of the process we want credible plans to improve learner outcomes. Our teams, and the province, will help the district to develop plans that are aligned to our long-term strategy – the Action Plan to 2014: Towards the Realisation of Schooling 2025.
Working with the province we must sought out the problem of schools with no permanently employed principals given that 10 principals are working on an acting capacity. This is crucial for curriculum leadership, stability and proper running of schools. A situation of having 97 vacant posts for educators, in one district, is utterly untenable, therefore requiring serious attention.
The district and circuits must raise the bar. With an adequate number of circuit managers, Mount Frere has the potential to provide effective support to schools in terms of management and governance matters and therefore has no reason to have dysfunctional schools.
Agreed, at provincial level there are other steps that need to be taken to improve the situation in this and other districts. Attending to the complexity of running a district that is housed in four buildings, with a shortage of subject advisors, school infrastructure and furniture are some of the necessary steps.
In a national context, our collective task is to create an environment that is conducive for quality learning and teaching. The primary school level is where we have to start laying a solid foundation for better outcomes and better results. Early childhood development is a priority of the ruling party.
This year we want to ensure a smooth implementation of the new Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements. Primary schools will now teach English from Grade 1, from this year. We will continue using the high-quality workbooks we introduced last year to support teaching and learning, ascertaining that learners have sufficient and quality materials.
The efficacy of the national workbook programme depends entirely on their proper use at school and at home, with the assistance of teachers and parents at home. For monitoring and accountability for what happens in the classroom, we will step-up the Annual National Assessments.
We must focus on improving literacy and numeracy across all grades. If we want children to read, then we must make them read, that is why we are prioritizing teacher development and learning and teaching support materials for all schools. Our focus on Mathematics, Physical Science, Life Sciences, Economics and Accounting will bear fruit only if we lay a strong foundation at this level, teaching tables every day if that’s what it will take to succeed.
If we do all these things right, including reviving and revitalising the culture of teaching and learning through strong structures of the Quality Learning and Teaching Campaign, we will improve fundamentally the completion rate of learners, roll-back the ‘drop-out’ level, provide proper career counselling, enhance literacy and numeracy skills across all grades, promote gateway subjects, build optimally functional schools, and attract talented young people to the noble profession of teaching.
As I say, all these things cannot be done without your involvement njengomphakathi obumbene; of course we cannot have schools that succeed without responsible managers and leaders from the bottom up. If we love flowers, and I know we do, together we must isolate unproductive weeds from the garden of knowledge. As they say, desperate times call for desperate measures.
We dare not fail the children of the Mount Frere District and the heroic people of the Eastern Cape who gave us legends among legends – OR Tambo, Chris Hani, Florence Matomela and many finest sons and daughters of the South African revolution.
We trust that this timely interaction will indeed help us remove all obstacles to quality learning and teaching and thus move us the more closer to achieving our educational, human resources, and development goals.
The ruling party has the responsibility to ensure our clear goal of improved quality of basic education is met. It was for good reason that we declared 2012 the year of Unity in Diversity. This two-day education indaba indeed serves to demonstrate how much we can achieve working together as a nation united by the common and noble goal of educating our children for a better life for all.
I have no doubt this is what gave our royal highness the passion to convene us here in January, at the very beginning of the school year, together to make every parent proud that she has given her child a better future in a better country through the might of the pen.
This august gathering has clearly shown the need to unite as a nation in support of our children and their education, just as we said we would do when we adopted the Nedlac Accord on Basic Education and Partnership with Schools in July 2011.
I would like to sincerely salute all education stakeholders and all our people for the support extended to us. I would also like to acknowledge the noble efforts of our educators who nurture and support learners at times under extreme circumstances.
Nkosi Ndevu, thank you for giving us soothing leaves of the Dock plant by way of this two-day intervention, as an antidote for nettle stings before us, more so, in the year of unity.
All thanks to all our partners and organisations for making time to be here, in the spirit of volunteerism of the 1950s to help us turn around schooling.
I thank you!
