Madam speaker
Honourable premier
Deputy speaker
Honourable Members of the Executive Council
Honourable Members of the Provincial Legislature
Invited guests from the education community including the representatives from teacher unions and governing body associations
Officials from the department
Comrades and friends
Introduction
Being responsible for Education is the greatest privilege that any public representative could have. Similarly, being able to shape the education system and its outcomes is a privilege and responsibility for you all. Together we have the opportunity to enhance the life chances of a generation of children. This is a challenge we must take on and take it on now.
Over the past fifteen years we have made significant strides in meeting many of the millennium development goals and other targets that we had set for ourselves in 1994. More specifically, we have ensured that we have increased access to schools and learning institutions. Our learner enrolments are near universal levels and female participation in our schools and institutions are amongst the highest in the world. More learners now enter high schools than ever before.
This government has introduced measures to ensure that the poorest of the poor are able to be in school and stay in school. This has been done through making the exemption of poor learners from paying school fees possible. To date, 1 016 Gauteng schools are no fee schools in quintiles one to three. We have made it possible to support fifty percent of the school learner population of Gauteng.
A total of 1 250 schools across the province are currently being served through the School Nutrition programme and almost 47 000 learners are being provided with scholar transport.
This year will also see the learners from quintile one high schools, benefiting from the School Nutrition programme. We will work hard to ensure that every deserving child is not absent from school because of a hungry stomach. The learner–teacher ratio has decreased considerably since 1994 and now stands at 36:1. Matric pass rates have also improved since 1994. In order to place these achievements into context, it is important to keep the scale of the education sector in mind.
There are 1 970 public schools in this province, and 430 independent schools of which 183 receive a state subsidy. We have 115 schools for learners with special educational needs (LSEN), eight Further Education and Training (FET)institutions and 52 Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) institutions. These institutions serve over 2 million learners, almost 20 percent of the total Gauteng population!
The key enabler for all of this to take place on a daily basis is our 59 000 educators. Given all of the above achievements, the question being posed is why is there a call for a renewal of education? The problem that we now confront as a country is the evidence of poor outcomes of our work in education to date.
Progress has not been optimal and achievements have not taken place at the required scale. Very simply put, our children are not coming out of our education institutions with the required skills and abilities to enable them to make successful transitions to either places of work or to engage in further studies. We compare very poorly internationally and even regionally, when compared to Mozambique and Mauritius.
Many of our learners in grade three and grade six are functioning significantly below the desired levels in education. We are performing particularly poorly in maths, science, computer literacy and languages. This has been confirmed by various international comparative studies as well as by the department’s own external assessment of learners.
There is also a correlation between learner performance and the geographical of schools. The majority, although not all, of underperforming schools is located in townships and informal settlements. This points to the enduring legacies of apartheid that we still need to deal with as well as to other contributing factors relating to the quality of management and leadership in our schools.
Studies commissioned by the Development Bank of South Africa (DBSA) have highlighted another area of concern that will impact on the quality of education and the status of the teaching profession. The teaching profession is not a career of choice for many young people today. The number of teacher graduates, nationally, has decreased from 70 000 in 1994 to 6 000 in 2006. A large section of our teachers also lack the subject knowledge required for them to teach effectively. This view is supported by noted educationist Nick Taylor and has been confirmed by a number of studies including those done for the Presidency’s 15 year review report.
We have also inherited a culture of resistance to assessment and evaluation. Much of this has its roots in how and for what purpose this was done in the years prior to 1994. Without an effective focus on performance and evaluation, we will not know where our specific weaknesses are and what interventions are required. Some progress has been made in terms of developing systems and procedures to carry out whole school evaluations. This is the foundation that we will have to start building on.
Many of our parents in the townships have also lost confidence in the schools in their areas. They end up spending fortunes in transport and fees, trying to get their children into suburban schools. This loss of confidence is an indicator that parents will vote with their feet when it comes to where they think they can obtain the best possible education for their children. We need to reverse this. We must make every school one that parents would want to send their children to out of choice!
So, today in Gauteng we have a significant number of schools which do not deliver quality when measured in terms of learner outcomes. The consequence of this is that many of our youth end up leaving education without the basics they will need to make their way in the world. I know that many of you have heard all of this before. It concerns me that the more we say it the more it might seem to be acceptable. We need to recognise that this poverty of attainment feeds the poverty of aspiration and self esteem in our learners.
This can no longer be acceptable: it is not acceptable to the learners affected, it is not acceptable to their families and it should not be acceptable to anyone involved in the education system in our province. In response to this widespread concern, we in the African National Congress made the following key commitments in our manifesto:
* Introduce a sustainable Early Childhood Development (ECD) system across the public and private sector, which gives children a head start in numeracy and literacy
* Universal access to grade R
* Improve the quality of schooling particularly in mathematics, science and technology
* Improve access for poor learners and ensure that 60 percent of schools are no fee schools in 2009
* Promote the status of teachers and improve their remuneration
* Improve school management to ensure that teachers are in school, in class, on time, teaching and that there is no abuse of learners and to
* Eradicate illiteracy by 2014.
Honourable members, in response to these commitments, our staff and provincial education stakeholders concluded last Friday a two day strategic planning workshop where we agreed on the following as our common vision for Gauteng’s Education Department over the next five years: “Ensuring every learner does well at school and leaves our institutions with the values, knowledge, skills and qualifications that will give them the best chance of success in life”. This is the outcome we want our huge army of 59 000 educators to be working towards.
At this workshop we recommitted ourselves to answering the call of President Zuma, in his state of the nation address to make the following the non-negotiables and I quote: “Teachers should be in school, in class, on time, teaching, with no neglect of duty and no abuse of pupils! The children should be in class, on time, learning, be respectful to their teachers and each other, and do their homework”.
We further agreed that to deliver on these commitments the Gauteng Department of
Education needs to do the following over the next four years:
* strengthen Gauteng Department of Education’s partnerships with all stakeholders, resulting in education becoming a societal priority
* ensure that Gauteng has effective schools and learning institutions
* ensure that Gauteng Department of Education’s head office and district offices provide relevant, coordinated and effective support
* enable young people to make the transition from school to further education and or work that provides further training opportunities.
This budget will begin to prioritise this work. We will be working hard to ensure that all role players have a meaningful voice in what needs to be done and how this needs to be achieved. We will look at ways in which all participatory structures in education can be strengthened to give a greater voice to parents and learners.
Policies are already in the pipeline to give school governing body associations a funded role in capacity building and training for their member organisations. Over the next five years we want to make sure that parents can play a greater role in their children’s day to day education. Education must not stop once children leave the school premises. We will be looking at how parents need to be supported to ensure that their children learn at home. This relates to monitoring homework, helping them to read and write, deal with nutrition at home, exercise and other inputs from the home that are critical for successful learning and development.
We also plan to help parents take greater responsibility for their children’s behaviour at school and help us ensure good conduct in the classroom. We want SGBs and the wider community to share the responsibility when their schools fail or under perform. We intend to ensure that information on the performance of schools is freely available. This will ensure that when a parent receives a report card for his or her child they will know not only about that child’s performance but also what the performance of the entire school has been.
We will also improve on existing data and information systems to ensure that this is done. Without us all knowing how well or poorly our schools are performing, we will never be able to direct interventions where they must be directed to. We want the parent and wider community to be able to monitor whether we are delivering on all the commitments we made in our manifesto.
Transforming our schools into centres of excellence
In her State of the Province address Premier Mokonyane has tasked Gauteng Department of Education to work towards making our schools centres of learning excellence. This starts by ensuring that we have effective institutions. We need to start with expanding the provision of ECD and access to grade R. It is critically important that we invest more in this part of our schooling system to ensure that our children have the right foundation before they start school.
We need to make sure that this foundation results in children being able to read and write before the end of grade one. This is one of the measures of a healthy school system. Children who cannot read by the end of grade one will struggle to access the rest of the curriculum and will find it increasingly difficult to make good progress in other subjects. In this regard, we have increased the allocation to ECD by 44 percent to an amount of R309 million.
I am happy to report to this house that we have been working hard over the past two months to register all ECD practitioners at our sites and to ensure that they receive their stipends every month and on time. We are currently investigating how we can reprioritise expenditure over the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTEF) to ensure more money is available to address the serious shortage of classrooms many of these facilities face.
The main challenge for any school system is to provide every child with almost 1 million minutes of quality education. A child, who starts pre-school at the age of four and stays in schooling up to the age of 18, will spend almost 1 million minutes in school. What they learn during their period at school is essentially what they learn during each one of those 1 million minutes. The quality of those classroom experiences is what drives learning, and it is the differences in the quality of those classroom experiences which must drive differences in how much students learn at schools.
This is the most overlooked truism about the performance of schools, that is, that learning happens in the classroom and that differences in how much students learn at school must ultimately be the result of differences of what happens in those classrooms. By implication, effective schools and school systems are only as effective to the extent that they create conditions under which effective teaching and learning occurs. What all research seems to be pointing at is that teacher quality impacts on student outcomes more than any other variable throughout primary and high school.
Teachers determine, in many ways, who will live in poverty or prosperity. They will determine, frequently, who gets to read, write, compute and go on to secondary and tertiary institutions. The department will be spending 73 percent of its R18,9 billion budget on personnel in this financial year. We need to ensure that every rand of that R13,8 billion contributes to delivering quality education, everyday.
To deal with the problem of teacher quality and possible skills deficits, the department will firstly develop a database for unemployed teachers who can be drawn on to fill vacancies. A pool of replacement teachers will also be established and trained to ensure that we can, without disrupting learning, take teachers out for intensive training and retraining.
The initial focus of this intervention will be on the foundation phase that focuses on literacy and numeracy. This training and development programme will last for anything up to six months and must result in those teachers going back into the classroom with the required confidence and competence to teach effectively. We need to ensure that every child is taught by a series of great teachers and that the almost 1 million minutes of classroom time are of the highest quality. It is with this objective in mind that we have revised the department’s mission to be: ‘Delivering quality education, in the classroom, everyday’.
One of the most important and perhaps most basic aspects of our system is that we have to improve school management so that we can ensure that teachers are at school, in class, on time and teaching. This will require that we explore systems and procedures that will enforce this basic work requirement. It is a non-negotiable that must be enforced by school and district management. We will more effectively communicate and implement recommendations coming from whole school evaluation reports and any other education research.
External assessment is another component of getting our schools to work towards better learning outcomes. We will conduct external assessments in grades three, six and 12. It is also possible that this might be done at the grade nine level. These processes will ensure that we have an accurate picture of our true level of performance. The results will tell us about more than just the performance of learners, it will highlight the quality of teaching and management in those schools. I am of the firm belief that learner achievement will almost never exceed the quality of leadership and management of a school and that improvement in performance will almost never occur in the absence of good leadership.
These tests together with the whole school evaluations will give us the most comprehensive picture of what is happening in every school. That will aid the department in determining to what extent it needs to intervene in specific schools and districts. These evaluations must give us a sense of the following:
* learner achievement
* the quality of teaching
* safety in learning places
* learner behaviour
* community involvement and participation
* leadership and management.
This should provide schools and the community with an objective assessment of their performance. It should also form the basis on which principals and their teams will be evaluated. What we need are leaders in our schools who can do the following four things very well:
* establish and communicate a vision for the school
* understand the people working in their school and help them develop
* organise people within their schools so that they function well
* manage the programme of teaching and learning.
This year we are reviewing the mandate and scope of the Mathew Goniwe School of
Governance and Leadership to determine how best we can ensure we have effective school leaders.
Honourable members on Friday this week President Zuma will be meeting with 1 500 school principals in KwaZulu-Natal to share his vision for education over the next five years. He will also speak about the important role he expects all principals to play in making this a reality. One hundred principals from this province will attend that meeting to hear his message. They will then have an opportunity to join me on a roadshow throughout Gauteng where together we will report back on the President’s message to every principal.
Better support for schools by GDE head and district offices
My recent experiences since coming into office have highlighted significant shortcomings in the manner in which the head office and district offices operate. When teachers do not get paid on time or when they are not paid at all and worse still, when it takes us a while to act on this means that something is wrong in the manner that we provide support.
The work of the head office and district offices will be sharpened to focus on more effective support to schools. The failure or underperformance of schools is a reflection of the weaknesses in a specific district and head office. We all must share a collective sense of responsibility for the performance of the education system, irrespective of where we are located. The performance management system needs to be adjusted to take this into account.
There is currently a discussion happening within education that proposes the establishment of circuits to support schools. This discussion suggests that circuits can provide common support to a cluster of schools including essential management and administrative services to:
* support principals in maintaining the smooth functioning of education institutions in the circuit
* help channel district office services to education institutions to support their teaching and learning mission and
* to provide direct professional support to practitioners in ECD centres and teachers in the primary school grades.
These proposals, in my view, could improve the support role of GDE as a whole and should be supported. Of course their success depends on us budgeting for and allocating adequate support to those whom we expect to play a fieldworker role including the basics such as transport, and communication. It is common practice in many large institutions that their head office staff spends time in the field to ensure that they understand the environment of their business much better. It is my view that this could also be done in Gauteng Department of Education as well as in every other government department.
I will be proposing to my staff that all head office staff from level 13 upwards be based in schools for at least a week every year. We need to know what goes on at the frontline in order to provide more effective support.
District facilities and equipment is an area that will be addressed in this budget
It is not acceptable that some of our district offices will not pass any basic health and safety requirement test let alone be favourable working environments. We need a set of norms and standards that must apply to all our district offices.
Information communication technology (ICT) can be a great enabler for effective learning and teaching. It is clear to everybody that Gauteng online has not performed to expectations. Discussions are underway on how to remedy this as a matter of urgency. We will communicate further on this matter by the end of August. School safety is an important contributing factor to poor learner performance. When children don’t feel safe from bullies, drug dealers and gangs they cannot be expected to perform at their best.
Schools will not be able to combat this on their own. We have already committed to developing policies and guidelines on school safety for public comment before the end of this year. The successful implementation of this will need the involvement of the whole school community and better links with Community Policing Forums (CPFs) and community patrollers and private security companies where necessary. This and future budgets will make provision for the incremental introduction of truancy officers and social workers in our schools to help learners with behavioural problems as well as victims of school based violence.
Overcrowding in the classroom presents another barrier to effective teaching and learning. The capital expenditure (CAPEX) allocation stands at R742 million. I am informed by my officials that we will be taking delivery of 14 new schools in this financial year. The major concern that we are attempting to rectify is the provision for repairs and maintenance of our schools. Through a budget reprioritisation exercise, we will attempt to find additional resources to ensure that we have sufficient funds to repair those schools that require urgent renovations. This includes three high schools in Merafong that were seriously damaged during resistance to boundary changes.
I want to take this opportunity honourable speaker to extend my sincere thanks to the South African Women in Construction (SAWIC) who, on Mandela Day, gave Umtholo School in Zonkisizwe a face lift. The effect of your sterling efforts has significantly raised teacher and learner morale at the school and we all owe you a great debt of gratitude!
One of the tasks that Premier Mokonyane has given Gauteng Department of Education is to develop a new standard design for schools in our province. We are excited to announce today that through the provincial sisterhood agreement with the Ile de France, we will re-conceptualisation the design of our school buildings so that we build twenty first century schools that cater for our new curriculum.
Enabling young people to make the transition from school to further education and or work that provides further training opportunities. Our educational outcomes must respond to the economic, social and governance needs. We will focus on intensifying school based career counselling and increasing access to career fairs and information. Similarly, we will focus on building the capacity of the career centre at the SciBono Discovery Centre to become the provincial hub for career guidance.
This work will also entail working with higher education institutions to conduct psychometric testing to support grade nine learners in high risk communities so that we identify career paths that match their personality and attributes. The intended outcome of this intervention is that learners will make the correct selection of subject choices to support their intended career path. We will do all of this to ensure that our learners know what is possible and also what our collective expectations of them are.
The work done to date on the skills talent pipeline must now be scaled up to full implementation across all secondary schools. The involvement of the private sector in supporting learners to realise their career paths through appropriate workplace experience is a key success factor. Likewise, it will also be very important that teachers should understand the demands of the workplace and thereby assess the adequacy of the learning content provided in the classroom.
Gauteng Department of Education will work with the new Ministry for Higher Education, provincial departments and the private sector to facilitate better access to bursaries and the national student loan fund by matriculates. During this term we will also work hard to support the ABET sector and ensure its different components including basic literacy, skills development and matric re-write are linked to all of the work we are doing to afford better opportunities to young adults. To this end we now have completed the registration of 52 ABET sites and we have ensured that ABET educators are also registered to receive their salaries on time each month.
On the 1st of April 2010, all our FET colleges will be transferred to the new Ministry of Higher Education. In the province we are currently reviewing the role of the Global City Region Academy to ensure that we have one coordinated approach and adequate capacity to assisting young people to making the transition from the world of school to the world of work.
Before I conclude honourable members, I want to pay tribute to our President for his leadership and vision, to our Premier for Kuyasheshwa because our people can wait no longer, to my colleagues in the Executive Council for their support, to Mr Leonard Davids our acting Head of Department and the team at Gauteng Department of Education for their hard work and dedication, to Comrade Pat Cheou and members of the Portfolio Committee for their insight and oversight and last but by no means least to the many thousands of principals and educators in our province who despite daunting challenges, prioritise the future of our children above all else.
Honourable members, our five year campaign to put our learning institutions on the road to excellence starts here today. It is a challenging task. Perhaps central to this task is to re-kindle the belief in each of us that this is truly possible. On Thursday last week the senior managers of Gauteng Department of Education committed themselves to lead this army of hope. I trust you will join us in spirit and in deed.
Thank you.
Source: Department of Education, Gauteng Provincial Government
