launch of the Bitou 10 Foundation, Plettenberg Bay
1 November 2007
"The importance of public-private community partnerships in education"
Bitou 10 community leaders, particularly the Mayor, Deputy Mayor and
councillors
Founder funders
Founder schools, principals, and managers
Teachers and pupils
Officials from my department and from the WCED
Educators and learners
Thank you for inviting me to the launch of the Bitou 10 Education and
Development Foundation. There are a number of impressive innovations in the
Bitou 10 school improvement intervention and I have been impressed in what I
have seen today. The project has features that are found in many education
projects in South Africa.
First, if we improve the physical conditions of schools, and if we improve
the equipment required for teaching and learning, then learner attainment will
improve.
Second, if we support school management teams in obtaining the necessary
financial and administration skills, systems and procedures to run the school
and the curriculum effectively and efficiently, we will make schools more
accountable and sustainable. In turn, this will lead to sustainable, learner
attainment at a high level. Third, the involvement of parents, educators and
the broad community is vital for the success of local schools.
I want to stress two observations this evening. The first is to do with the
importance of early reading and the second is to emphasise the importance of
embedding public-private partnerships securely in communities.
The first point is about early reading
The difference between the learner attainment of advantaged and
disadvantaged children becomes apparent very early on in life. There are many
studies that show this, that measure attainment in terms of years ahead and
years behind. But these studies also show that early reading makes a
difference. Encouraging parents to read to their children in those vital early
years can make a huge difference to later academic success. We must encourage
parents to read to their children, but to achieve this we must also ensure that
we eradicate adult illiteracy in our country.
The most striking thing about Bitou 10 is the success you have had with
early reading.The Joint Education Trust (JET) evaluated the project in 2003 and
2007. JET's Nick Taylor says there has been a huge improvement in reading
skills at Grade 3. In fact, he says he has never seen such an improvement
anywhere else in the country.
I quote: "Indeed, in 20 years of evaluating programmes of this kind, the
author has never seen gains of this magnitude". He credits the huge improvement
to the teaching of reading by Marlene Rousseau and Beulah Foley. Earlier today,
Marlene explained to us how she does this. I would like to endorse key elements
of the "model" she uses.
First, children need to read early and often, but with a focus on reading
for meaning. Here stories are critical, all kinds of stories, stories from
teachers, stories from children, and stories from books. Second, writing is the
key to the development of literacy. Children write about what they read. You
cannot have the one without the other, reading without writing. Children are
encouraged to write from grade 1.
Last, changing teachers' reading practices takes time. As Marlene told us
earlier, she has been working at Wittedrif Primêr since 2004 and in The Crags
and Phakamisani since 2005. To begin with, Marlene spent six weeks at the
school in classrooms. Afterwards she visited the schools for days at a time
over the next two or three years to date.
As Marlene says, it is these on-site demonstrations that provide a far more
effective training method than workshops. In workshops, teachers are told what
to do, without being shown how to do it.
This year we began the "Drop all and Read" campaign that encourages
principals to set aside a specific reading period at school. This was an
important intervention, but one that we soon discovered had a limited impact
without a specialist like Marlene to teach teachers to teach children how to
read.
The department has just completed the development of an Early-Grade Reading
Assessment instrument which is being piloted in selected districts in Sepedi,
Xitsonga, Tshivenda, isiXhosa, isiZulu and English to help teachers monitor
reading progress in their classrooms, and to help us keep an eye on how all our
schools are doing.
This emphasises the crucial importance we attach to early learning in our
policy and practice. The second point I want to make is about the importance of
community-based public-private education partnerships. I am delighted to
witness the success of a partnership between the education and private sectors,
between the ten founder schools and the founder funders, led by Cadbury South
Africa and the DG Murray Trust which has always had a particular interest in
and generosity to education.
I would like to thank the partners in this project for their investment in
the development of the Bitou 10 schools. The Bitou 10 has begun to overcome the
inequalities of the past. They have begun to put into place those essential
building blocks of a good school. They have begun to emphasise the importance
of good leadership and good school management. They have begun to focus on
generating the commitment of the teachers, and they have begun to work on
building good discipline.
What this intervention has shown is that the transformation of
under-performing schools is possible with the right mix of government
resources, with the right mix of private resources, and with that essential
ingredient, parental involvement.
The role of the private sector in the education system cannot be
over-emphasised. One of the goals that we have set ourselves in the second
decade of our freedom is to ensure that we consolidate and strengthen our
education system by focussing on the quality of learning and teaching that
takes place in our schools. The improvement of the quality of education
requires an injection of new resources.
From the side of government, we have initiated a quality improvement,
development, support and upliftment programme (QIDS-UP) to allocate new
learning resources to schools in all of our poorest and most disadvantaged
communities. However, given the backlogs that our NEIMS survey has revealed, it
is clear that government cannot overcome the legacy of educational inequality
alone. The role and participation of the private sector and private citizens is
critical to the success of our quest to provide resources to our schools.
Public-private partnerships like the Bitou 10 Foundation, which is launched
tonight, are vital in reaching out to our communities.
It is also clear that such partnerships also transcend the provision of
financial resources and involve intellectual partnerships and the transfer of
skills, I think of the role of your specialist service providers. It is also
important that partnerships are sustainable, if they are to make any meaningful
impact.
It is with a community-embedded public-private partnership like Bitou 10
that we will be able to turn our schools into community hubs. Schools are more
than a place of learning and teaching. Our schools need to become centres of
community life.
When they do, then communities have taken "ownership" of their schools. I
was saddened at one school that I visited today to see the iron bars protecting
a computer laboratory. This does not reflect community ownership.
I understand the process that the Bitou project has gone through to
negotiate communities taking "ownership" of these schools; the mayor's
education indaba could be copied in many other communities throughout the
country.
And the memorandum of understanding that will bind the founding funders, the
founding schools and the communities is a model that other communities in our
country could explore.
I congratulate the Western Cape Education Department for taking such an
interest in the project and EMDC Director, Bonnie Sesenyamotse, for pioneering
the memorandum.
I also congratulate Cadbury and the DG Murray Trust for pioneering this
initiative seven years ago. My sincere thanks to Mr Ractcliffe and the team he
has drawn on for this vital initiative. I conclude by thanking all those who
have played a role in the development of the Bitou 10 Foundation.
Thank you.
Issued by: Department of Education
1 November 2007
Source: Department of Education (http://www.education.gov.za)
