Speech for the MEC for Education in KwaZulu-Natal Mr Senzo Mchunu at the release of results of the 2012 National Senior Certificate results

The Honourable Premier of the Province of KwaZulu-Natal, Dr Mkhize,
Members of the Provincial Executive Council,
Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee for Education, Ms L. Hlongwa,
Members of the Legislature,
Head of Department, Dr NSP Sishi,
Top Management of the Department of Education,
Leaders and Representatives of Organized Labour,
Representatives of School Governing Bodies,
Our Social and Business Partners in Education,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and gentlemen.

It is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to this, the 2012 release of matric results in KwaZulu-Natal.

This event rings the bell to thousands of our 2012 matriculants that their schooling years have come to an end. It also serves to confirm – at the same time – that it is time for them to begin their real education. The event further rings the bell to the 2013 matriculants and all learners in general, that they need to start preparing themselves to work hard in the year ahead.

It signals to parents that they need to love and support their children. The bell also signals to teachers to be ready mentally, spiritually and physically for the year ahead. Managers need to understand that a learner and a classroom are the centrepiece of all that they do. In short, the 2013 academic year has begun.

Education is delicately placed in every individual’s life. It plays a pivotal role in determining one’s development and an individual’s role in the world. All of us are worthy of our education, so it shall be and more for our children… Let us all live the talk!

This event therefore gives us an opportunity as the department, to reassure the public that we are more determined than ever to improve the quality of education of all our children, urban or rural – in all grades in our schooling system. We will strengthen our grasp in understanding our challenges and tighten our grip in dealing with all of them.

We are quite pleased that this administration has continued to make education its apex priority. Furthermore, we are pleased that the ruling party, the African National Congress has, as part of its resolutions, put a lot more emphasis on issues pertaining education. The three areas we considered to be key, are the processes involved in appointing principals, teachers who also serve as councillors and the Early Childhood Development.

Below are some of the resolutions adopted at the ANC’s 53rd National Conference held in Mangaung this past December:

• The Conference noted that principals are professionals and managers of schools, and so resolved that relevant legislation must be amended to allow for a different method of appointment.
• And that the role of School Governing Bodies (SGBs) in the appointment of school principals must be clarified and communicated to all stakeholders, particularly, learners, parents and communities.
• It further noted that teachers who are employed as councillors are inevitably distracted by the additional obligations, which impact negatively on their performance. Therefore it resolved that government must prioritise passing a law that prevents civil servants from taking up employment or positions as local government councillors whilst still employed in government posts.
• On ECD, the conference resolved that a National Policy for Grade R must be finalised in order to make Grade R compulsory, and
• That Grade R teachers must be adequately qualified and that professionalisation of all Grade R practitioners must be achieved by 2018.

We believe that these policies and others on education will impact positively on the sector and that they will enable us to perform our work better.

We therefore pledge our commitment of ensuring that we confront and address without hesitation, any level of under-performance in our education system. We will strive to make certain that the schooling environment and facilities are safe, functional and well maintained.

Regrettably, there were quite a number of unfortunate incidents that occurred in 2012 – which took the lives of our learners. Of great significance were three tragic road accidents, which took place at Bulwer, Indwedwe and in Bergville. These accidents claimed the lives of 38 children.

The department was compelled to suspend learner excursions until the end of the year. There is no doubt that, the suspension of such excursions gave us a breather, as there were no major accidents reported afterwards, that involved our children. We wish to express our gratitude to all those who supported us. But we also wish to re-assure them that such announcement was not necessitated by the need to show who has more power than any other. We are responsible for all children who are part of our schooling system.

During this month of January, we will officially announce mechanisms that all schools must adhere to in order to minimize and where possible, avert these accidents. We have worked closely with the Department of Transport in the province. Our nation is poorer without these bright stars.

There were also a number of incidents including learners stabbing one another on school premises - which resulted in a number of fatalities. Parents must be reminded to make sure that their children do not carry dangerous objects and weapons to school. Schools must always be treated as sacred places for learning. To those who lost their children we say, your loss is also our loss!

In the same year, there were a number of road accidents, which claimed the lives of our teachers while they were on their way to or from school. Our hearts go out to their families. Another chilling incident was that of the fatal shooting of a teacher on school premises at KwaMaphumulo in Ilembe District. This dreadful incident took place on the final day of the 2012 academic year. We are working closely with the police in order to get to the bottom of matter. Our fervent wish is that the perpetrators will be traced and face the full might of the law.

Our desire is to build a world-class education system in our lifetime. A system that produces learners who are competent and have acquired appropriate skills that will see them become productive members of society - with a meaningful contribution to the country’s economy. For this we need parents who will forever be supportive of their children.

We need teachers with a steadfast determination and dedication to their work. This system also needs managers who are efficient and effective in their work. We also need communities with an unwavering support of the department’s efforts to improve the system.

We will always take a moment to reflect and review our processes in order to identify any blockages that compromise the delivery of high quality education. This, with the view to ensure that our system is improved towards sustainable, high quality education delivery. We are putting more focus on the six fundamental challenges we have always spoken about.

These challenges are as follows:

• Curriculum management and delivery in schools
• Shortage of qualified teachers and lack of capacity among others
• Lack of Classroom Equipment
• Inadequate infrastructure
• Lack of adequate management skills from schools to provincial level, and
• Shortage of finance

But we have added one more, that is the Transformation of the Schooling System in the province. It is a programme we launched towards the end of 2012, which seeks to redress past imbalances, improve curriculum offerings to learners and improve support and development for educators.

During this year and the following years, there will be sharper focus on learning and teaching time. We need teachers, learners, managers and all stakeholders to understand that learning and teaching time is sacrosanct. Isikhathi sokufunda nokufundisa singcwele bakithi.

The system has recorded some remarkable achievements in the last few years. Government has been able to provide a healthy meal on a daily basis to over 2 million learners. This has contributed to attendance of school.

We are still struggling with major backlogs though on infrastructure. I should mention that the total number of classroom backlog currently stands at 9 580. But there have been major improvements when it comes to infrastructure provision and delivery in the province. There have been new state of the art schools built in different areas of the province.

The schools we build today have – as a general norm – a library, science laboratory, multi-purpose classrooms and specialised classrooms, irrespective of their location whether rural or urban.

We have also come up with innovative ways to provide classroom equipment to 3 185 public schools. The delivery of which already started before the end of 2012 and will be completed in the early part of this year.

Key to our tasks as a department is curriculum management and delivery. We have sought to intensify our capacity to overcome most of our problems and perform this task at a high level. In 2012, we visited all twelve Districts. We held a curriculum workshop as well as a refinement session to consolidate the outcomes of that workshop.

Through these activities we sought to address the disparities that exist across districts in the support of curriculum. We also wanted to ensure that there were clearly defined roles in the integration of the responsibilities of circuit managers and subject advisors in relation to curriculum management at school level. These activities also sought to strengthen the inter-phase between subject advisors and school principals.

Following these district visits we designed intervention programmes to address the challenges that we found. These interventions resulted in some schools including Cwakeme Secondary move from 28,75% in 2011 to 96,08% in 2012 and Isolemamba Secondary move from 20,99% in 2011 to 94,75% in 2012.

The Provincial Intervention Teams have also continued to do their work – which further assisted in diagnosing some of the factors that remained the fundamental cause of underperformance in many schools.

The department will, throughout 2013 intensify its efforts in the training of teachers, particularly in Maths and Science. And as such, 98 training sessions are already scheduled. These training sessions will also include Subject Advisors and School Management Teams (SMTs).

The fundamental thing about work in education is that it requires hard work and hard work, only very hard work. We therefore intend inspiring everybody in the sector to be a hard worker physically, mentally and in conscience.

The ANA Results show that the province has recorded an improvement in the levels of achievement of learners in mathematics at Foundation Phase. However, there was a drop in Grade 6 mathematics and a very low base in Grade 9. Full details of the results are provided in the Schools Report 2012 that the Department has developed and made available at this function.

We acknowledge the improvement recorded, but more still needs to be done to ensure that all children in these Grades are competent enough in Literacy and Numeracy. It is for this reason that from this month (January 2013), the Department of Education will use Dokkies as an Institute for in-service teacher training targeting Mathematics and Science, in particular.

We are pleased that working relations between the unions – teacher unions in particular – and the department have continuously improved over the years. We are humbled and very much encouraged by this. It is clear that our combined efforts can only benefit the young people of this province – whose interests we are all here to serve. We are proud to say that we have been able to consolidate our efforts towards educational excellence.

Pass analysis

The total number of registered candidates for 2012 was 132 232. Of this number, 127 258 actually wrote their exams. This province was able to pass 93 003 matric learners in 2012 compared to 83 201 in 2011. Of the number of learners passing, 43 826 are male and 49 177 are female.

There were 34 779 learners who qualified to pursue a university degree in 2012 compared to 27 397 in 2011, while 36 841 learners qualified to study towards a diploma in 2012 compared to 34 190 in 2011.

In 2011 there were 116 schools that achieved 100% pass rate, this number however dropped in 2012 to 106. But we are also pleased to announce that the number of schools that got a pass percentage below 60% is 473 in 2012 compared to 633 in 2011.

We are unhappy to report that in 2012 there were 34 schools that got a pass percentage below 20%, though it was an improvement from the 50 in 2011. We remain resolute in our quest to eliminate such non-performance in the province.

At this point I wish to mention to you the number of distinctions recorded in 9 subjects, the total of which was 12 404 compared to 7 001 in 2011.

Number of distinctions per nine key subjects

We are also pleased to announce that the province recorded some improvements in pass percentages in two gateway subjects – Mathematics and Physical Science. Whereas in 2011 the pass percentage was 39.5% in Maths, in 2012 it improved to 48.1% while in Physical Science, we improved from 51.9% in 2011 to 58.3% in 2012.

District performance

All 12 districts in the province have achieved a pass rate above 65% - this means we are 5% clear of the threshold of 60%.

Pass rate

I am therefore pleased to report that the province of KwaZulu-Natal has recorded a 5% improvement from 68.1% in 2011 to 73.1% in 2012. This makes the 2012 achievement is the highest pass rate that the province has ever achieved since the introduction of the National Senior Certificate examinations in 2008. Good as these results may be, they still pose a huge challenge in terms of quality in various aspects. They also indicate the need for more hard work.

Congratulations to the Class of 2012 for their success. While we celebrate the achievements of learners who passed, there are learners who may have missed a pass by a few marks. We would like to encourage all those who did not succeed not to despair. The Department of Education will establish classes in selected education centres in each of the 12 districts to provide tuition support for learners who would like to sit for supplementary examinations and improve their chances of success. This applies also to learners who have passed and would like to improve their pass mark.

We wish to take this opportunity to thank all the teachers for their dedication; parents for the support they gave us; School Governing Bodies for their invaluable role in keeping our schools in check; teacher unions for working with us; business community for supporting us by contributing in the resourcing and capacitating our schools and last but not least, our learners for their dedication and hard work.

Let us move towards consolidating our gains towards excellence in the year ahead.

I thank you!