Programme Director, Dr Dan More
Hon Minister of Mineral Resources, Ms Susan Shabangu
Education MEC, Mrs Louisa Mabe
Implats CEO, Mr Terence Goodlace
Executive Mayor, Cllr Mpho Khunou
Representative of Impala Bafokeng Trust, Mrs Carol Maila
Community of Sunrise View Primary
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
Good morning. I would like to thank Impala Platinum for giving us the new Sunrise View Primary School, built in partnership with the Impala Bafokeng Trust and the North West Provincial Education Department. We welcome this initiative.
We’ve added a new school to the education enterprise because Impala had responded warmly to a letter from the principal of Paardekraal Primary School requesting an urgent intervention.
Paardekraal Primary had been inundated with requests for admission given that the Impala home ownership programme had increased the population of Boitekong.
I’m glad the North-West Department of Education responded positively to Impala Platinum’s proposal that a new school be funded through a public private partnership. And so, in addition to providing houses to its employees, the company has also delivered a school where their children could be taught.
Investing in employees, taking into cognisance their basic needs, assisting in creating a better life for them, and their families and children, is a sustainable way of building a better country that’s stable, highly productive and prosperous.
This is the most viable path towards sustaining a company’s success and strengthening stakeholder relations.
We welcome this partnership whose outcome will be this new Primary School, a Secondary School, a Lecture Hall and School Hall, from a budget of about R80 million.
An investment in education is an investment in the future. It is an investment that is requisite for building a country that works, and most importantly, a country that is united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous.
When we launched the National Schools Build Programme, in December 2012, our message was quite clear. We said, and I repeat: ‘Infrastructure is central to the attainment of good quality education outcomes.’
Partnerships are very central if we’re to achieve our human resources development goals. A shared country perspective on education will advance the production of knowledge and skills critical for economic and social development. Partnering is strategic for fighting poverty, inequality and joblessness.
We have made great strides in education and partnerships have contributed to success. For instance school attendance is close to 100% for the basic compulsory band, in the 7 to 15 year age-range.
We have our challenges though, thus the importance of mutual partnerships. The results of the Annual National Assessments (ANA) we released in September 2012 confirmed that a number of factors are at play in the education system. These include demographic and historical realities of South Africa.
For instance the negative impact of poverty was clearly borne out by emerging patterns of performance across the quintiles.
We trust that this new school will help improve Annual National Assessment results by prioritising literacy and numeracy skills.
As we reported, in ANA, learner performance in the Foundation Phase (Grades 1, 2 and 3) is pleasing and there is progress in the Intermediate Phase (Grade 4, 5 and 6). In Grade 3, the national average performance in Literacy improved from 35% to 52%, an improvement of 17%.
In Grade 3 Numeracy, performance was 41%, from 28% in 2011, a 13% improvement. In Grade 6, national average performance in Languages was 43% (Home Language) and 36% (First Additional Language), compared to 28% in 2011. In Grade 6 Mathematics, average performance dropped to 27% compared to 30% in 2011.
Again we thank all our partners and broader society for supporting education. It is through all our efforts that in 2012 we achieved a national average pass of 73.9% in National Senior Certificate exams. We thank all teachers for their hard work and dedication.
We call for a visible ‘rise of the guardians’. We want parents to lend a helping hand to Sunrise View and other schools. Working together we can bring to the children wonder, hope and dreams as fairies and guardians do in legends.
To the extent that we all play our rightful roles in education and society, this new and breath taking school will generate rays of hope bringing forth a new dawn to this community like the never-failing sun.
This whole community has a duty to give this school a new identity, a winning formula and an unmatched culture of excellence. Nothing is impossible. As we’ve learnt from Aristotle, “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.”
Thank you to Impala, the Trust, and our department here. Indeed you have boosted our confidence at the very start of the new school year by giving our children a New Year Gift of a lifetime.
The 101-year old ruling party – the African National Congress – has charged us with the task of prioritising primary education. Indeed you have enhanced the goal of prioritising quality education from the formative years.
Programme Director,
On behalf of the community of Boitekong, the Bojanala West region, the province and our government and people as a whole, it is indeed an honour for us to receive officially Sunrise View Primary School.
Working together we can do more to improve the lives of all our people and all our children. In Setswana we say this even better: “Fa re tshwaragane jaaka ngatana ya dikgong, di ka re ungwela go tlala seatla.”
Ke ya leboga.
