Programme director Mrs Lucy Moyane
District Director Mr Mfana Lushaba
Senior Managers and Officials from Head Office
District management team
Circuit managers
Principals
Ladies and gentlemen
I greet you all.
We are meeting here today to attend to matters at the heart of education delivery. Last week we met with all the secondary school principals, circuit managers and Further Education and Training (FET) curriculum Implementers in Gert Sibande District. The purpose of these meetings is to discuss with you strategies and tactics on how best we can improve our performance as a province in general and Ehlanzeni District in particular.
Mpumalanga province obtained position nine out of nine provinces in the country, although we were the fourth most improved province but our performance is not convincing. This is a worrying factor hence these Review Performance Summit.
I want us to look at our performances per circuit and per district. This will give us a picture of which circuits and schools are letting the province down. Schools that under-performed last year must give us their turn-around strategy. Those schools that performed well in 2010 grade 12 results must share with us their best practices or the miracles that they employ which makes them the best.
It is my wish that at the end of this review summit as a collective we should be having a sense of what we should expect at the end of this academic year 2011. We cannot afford to remain at position number last while the government of the day is pumping lots of money in the system and has prioritised education as “thee “priority.
As a District, Ehlanzeni obtained position one with 68,6 % in the province, but I am convinced that you can do better than this. If you look at Nkululeko Circuit in 2004 it obtained 72, 83%, since then it has been declining and nose diving to operating at less than 50%.
Such a decline is not good for education delivery and excellence. A strange phenomenon exists in Ehlanzeni where a situation where schools in the same circuit, same area in one year performs exceptionally well and the following year perform dismally. The circuit managers must tell us what is it that they are going to do differently in order to improve their performance.
There are schools in deep rural areas that have shortage of resources and infrastructural challenges but they produce 90 – 100 percent pass rate.
It is unfortunate that those schools that under-perform use the lack of resources and infrastructural challenges as a justification for underperformance. If you ask them why they are not performing they tell you about challenges, shortage of toilets, unfenced schools andsuch reasons as falling of the ceilings without making self-introspection and analysis of the real situation. It is true that the department must deliver on the needs of the school but that should not be an excuse for not performing.
When doing moderation of tasks it has been discovered that some schools are not doing justice to the quality standard as required by policy. The standard of assessment tasks is sometimes so low or there is lack of evidence of moderation of assessment tasks by HODs and SMTs at school level.
One of the vehicles through which we can improve is to strengthen subject committees and empowered to drive and champion discussions and delivery on content in their various subjects.
Cluster meetings must also be strengthened to serve as forums for teachers to discuss and share good skills and expertise. Sharing of good approaches to subject teaching will assist struggling and underperforming teachers.
The President of the Republic has directed that teachers be on time, on task teaching and observe the 7 hour working period per day.
Principals and School Management Teams are called upon to ensure that teachers report regularly and punctually to schools, learners attend school regularly and punctually and that the effective utilisation of teaching time and the movement between periods (transition time) is monitored.
Principals and School Management Teams must ensure that contact teaching time is not disrupted by activities during school hours.
Activities like meetings, memorial services, sports, cultural and pay days should not eat on time allocated for teaching and learning. I believe that if we are serious about the education of our learners at the end of this seminar we will no longer be the same; we will be sharing the same vision of meeting our 70% target in 2014.
