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Teachers
According to a new study, poor pay is a key factor in the decision of many South African teachers to seek work in the United Kingdom. The as-yet-unpublished study by Oxford research fellow Dr K Ochs, surveyed 192 teachers recruited from other Commonwealth countries to jobs in the UK. Ninety % of the South Africans who responded said they did not consider financial packages at home attractive enough, compared to a figure of just 60% in Australia. One thousand teachers in the Western Cape were absent during the first two months of 2007 due to, amongst other reasons, stress. Teachers feel alone, unsupported and disillusioned. The department said it would no longer accept doctors’ certificates for stress unless they were issued by a psychiatrist.
Teachers are under pressure from high work loads, violence and undisciplined learners. Since the introduction of the new curriculum which depends on continuous assessment, teachers have been complaining that they spend more time keeping up with paperwork than teaching. Other factors that are inhibiting successful teaching are class sizes, a discipline system where the rights of ringleaders seems to be prioritised, the rights of teachers that are being ignored, lack of in-service training for the new curriculum and weak departmental administration. A shortage of 50 000 teachers is foreseen within the next three years if government does not urgently intervene to improve the working conditions of teachers.
In yet another incident of school-related violence, a Grade 2 Eastern Cape educator died after being shot three times by a man masked in a balaclava. In expressing his condolences with the family of the murdered educator, Johnny Mankato, MEC for education in the Eastern Cape, stressed the importance of the speedy implementation of the education department's security programme for schools. This programme, he hoped, together with the co-operation of the community, would bring an end to violence at schools.
Tertiary education
Increasing numbers of foreign students are enrolled at South African universities. Last year more than 52 000 students from 10 countries in Southern and Central Africa were enrolled at South African universities and universities of technology. At the recently held conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers in Cape Town, education ministers from Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Zambia stated that South Africa’s universities are among the best on the continent.
The sale of Decor’s Graduate Institute of Management and Technology to a BEE group has given birth to South Africa’s first black-owned business school that will focus on building local government capacity. In another deal women’s empowerment group Winhold and businessman Vincent Rosaria bought 26% of the executive education arm of Stellenbosch University’s business school. New academic research programmes introduced by the Marang Centre (a maths and science facility at Wits education campus in Parktown) are set to develop capacity and produce a pool of more maths and science leaders on the African continent. Research will be spread over three years with a strong mentorship component.
Teenage pregnancies
The number of teenage pregnancies in South Africa is increasing rapidly. According to the department of education, more than 72 000 girls aged between 13 and 19 did not attend school last year because they were pregnant. Official figures from the provincial departments of education reveal that 5 868 learners in KwaZulu-Natal and 1 748 in the Free State fell pregnant last year, while about 5 000 teenage pregnancies were reported in Limpopo. Gauteng recorded 2 542 teenage pregnancies in the past two years. In the light of the severe HIV/AIDS epidemic that is reaping havoc in South Africa, it is a very disturbing fact that so many teenage pregnancies occur, and questions arise such as: How many of these girls are infected with HIV and what does the future hold for these girls and their babies? According to Steven Levitt, writer of the international bestseller Freakonomics, ‘growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child’s propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother.’ Educators should ensure that learners are equipped to enter adulthood with the potential to make a living and provide for a family. However, this cannot be done without highly qualified educators, and the wholehearted support of government, the education department, business, society and parents.
HIV/AIDS
The minister of education recently launched the Higher Education HIV & AIDS (HEAIDS) programme. The challenge faced by the higher education sector with regard to HIV/AIDS is succinctly captured in the following statement from the Association of African Universities: ‘To a greater degree than ever before, African universities must renew their commitment to help Africa find effective solutions to its perennial problems of hunger, poverty and disease. In particular, the HIV/AIDS crisis poses a serious threat to African societies within which universities are situated. We need to recognise that the solution to this problem might well lie in Africa. African universities must, in any event, be in the forefront of research, education and action in this matter.’ As a nationally coordinated effort in the fight against HIV/AIDS, HEAIDS seeks to strengthen the capacity, systems and structures of all higher education institutions in managing and mitigating the causes, challenges and consequences of HIV/AIDS in the sector and to strengthen the leadership role that can and should be played by the higher education sector.
According to the minister, one of the first activities of the HEAIDS programme will be a national survey involving a sample of 25 000 staff and students, to establish HIV prevalence on the campuses and to understand the beliefs and behaviour of students as they relate to HIV/AIDS. A second area of activity that will take shape soon is the focus on equipping student teachers to deal more effectively with the challenges they will face as they enter the classroom. More detailed content on HIV and AIDS in the teaching curriculum will be developed and more time will be spent on developing the skills that teachers need to respond to learners living with the virus or affected by its impact on their families.
Inclusive schools
Six years after the department of education first put forward the idea that many children with disabilities and learning impairments should be accommodated in public schools, there is still no idea how this can be done or funded, says a new paper by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). There is also no clear idea of how many learners in South Africa have special educational needs. The white paper which tackles the idea of ‘inclusive education’, envisages offering the country’s 12m learners a learning environment in which those who experience ‘barriers to learning’, from physical and mental disability through psycho-social disturbances and to poverty, are all accommodated, excluding the most severely physically and mentally disabled. While the white paper states that changing South African’s education system to an all inclusive one would take 20 to 25 years, none of the short-term goals set by the education department have yet been met.
Food-rich school environments
The Woolworths Trust EduPlant has launched its 2007 programme with a series of free, empowering workshops that will help educators to create food-rich, sustainable environments at schools. Coordinated by Food and Trees for Africa, Woolworths Trust EduPlant – with the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, LandCare SA and SABC Education – is offering a programme that promotes and supports schools to grow good food, using resource-efficient permaculture (environmentally-friendly gardening and farming) techniques. Last year more than 380 schools participated in the Woolworths Trust EduPlant programme. Workshop topics include water harvesting, soil improvement, natural resource mapping, recycling design, as well as how to involve learners in the school’s living, learning laboratory.
School enrolment
In 2006, 12.3m learners in South Africa were enrolled at 26 292 ordinary schools (public and independent schools) and served by 386 595 educators, resulting in an average learner-to-school ratio of 468 and an average learner-to-educator ratio of 31.8. By comparison, in 2000, 11.9m learners were enrolled at 27 760 ordinary schools and served by 363 343 educators, resulting in average ratios of 429 and 32.8, respectively. The majority of the 2006 learners (92.2% or 11.96m) were enrolled at 25 194 public schools and served by 367 188 educators, with a learner-to-school ratio of 475 and a learner-to-educator ratio of 32.6. In the case of independent schools the ratios for 2006 were significantly lower at 310 and 17.5, respectively. On a provincial basis, the four provinces with the largest number of children, viz, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, the Eastern Cape and Limpopo, had the highest numbers of learners, educators and ordinary schools in 2006. Learner-to-educator ratios varied between 29.1 in North West and 34.1 in Mpumalanga, while learner-to-school ratios varied between 359 in the Eastern Cape and 788 in Gauteng.
Although enrolment at public schools increased by only 2.7% from 11.65m in 2000 to 11.96m in 2006, enrolment at independent schools increased by 32.7% from 256 283 to 340 060 during the same period. In 2006, Gauteng had the highest percentage of learners enrolled at independent schools (8.6%), followed by the Western Cape with 3% and Mpumalanga with 2.3%. North West had the lowest percentage enrolled at independent schools, namely 1.2%.
Policy
‘A mobilised national consensus around education and broader social intervention is needed if SA is to grasp the structural constraints sustaining inequality and exclusion in its schools and education system’ says Graeme Bloch of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). The disparities existing between 2007 schools are disconcerting. He pointed out that a ‘host of out-of-school factors impact heavily on leaner performance’. Many are historical and sociological factors with deep roots which can only be addressed partially through school-based initiatives with the rest needing broader social interventions. The DBSA aims to achieve a broader understanding of the social factors impacting on the delivery of quality education and strives for a more comprehensive frame of intervention. Education minister Pandor has approved the appointment of a six-member team of experts led by independent analyst Gugu Nyanda to determine how bad SA’s school dropout rate is and why learners drop out. While primary school enrolment has stayed close to 100% many children drop out of school before reaching matric or even before completing nine years of compulsory education. In the past few years the dropout rate has been quoted as being anything from 22% to 60%.
e-learning
Business and educational institutions are increasingly using online instruction/distance education as a teaching method. In 2000 investment in e-learning in the USA was $2.2b and was estimated to exceed $23b by 2004. However, very few empirical investigations of this method of teaching have been done so far. One investigation into the high drop-out rate of students attending e-learning courses shows that student’s satisfaction with e-learning is a key indicator in their decision to drop-out, while the academic locus of control seems to have no impact on their decision. As e-mail forms an important medium for Internet-based education concerns exist about the care students put into writing their e-mail messages.
Scholastic performance
In an effort to improve SA’s poor matric results the DoE will, for the first time, set mathematics and language exam papers for Grade 11 pupils. National exam papers will also be set for all the other Grade 11 subjects and some schools will be selected to write these papers to enable the DoE to benchmark standards.
The KwaZulu-Natal department of education has reportedly instructed schools to promote grade 11 pupils who failed last year to matric. The reasoning seems to be that normally, failed grade 11s opt to repeat grade 11 at school; however, this year that means that these pupils are doing the New Curriculum Statement with all the changes that accompany the introduction of the new curriculum. As a result, most pupils are not coping with this shift. Moreover, some schools are not able to provide additional assistance to these pupils. A spokesperson for the National Teachers Union has described the decision as a ‘good formula of disaster’, contributing to a continued decline in matric results in the province. The KwaZulu-Natal directive follows an earlier statement by the director-general of education that the department will not allow 38 000 failed Grade 11 pupils in the Eastern Cape to be pushed through to matric this year.
The department of education announced that South African learners would not be participating this year in an international maths and science test in which it has twice come last, the Sunday Times reported. The test is conducted every four years. In 1999 South Africa came last out of 38 countries, and in 2003 last out of 50. The reason given for the decision was that the department did not want to ‘over-test’ pupils, as they would already undergo one domestic and one Southern and Eastern African regional test this year.
Early Childhood Development (ECD)
According to an article in The Lancet world wide at least 200m children younger than 5 year fail to reach their potential in cognitive and socio-emotional development, because of: malnutrition leading to stunting, iodine and iron deficiencies, and inadequate stimulation in their first five years of life. These children are likely to fare poorly in school and subsequently have low incomes, high fertility, and provide poor care for their children, leading to an intergenerational transmission of poverty. As there are effective and low cost actions to prevent the damage and remedy these deficiencies, this lost potential is preventable, but the problem is the lack of professional and political commitment to mobilise action.
Skills deficit
South Africa is facing a serious IT skills deficit due mostly to a lack of training. ‘We are not seeing a big enough inflow into the economy of IT and engineering graduates,’ said director of black-empowered IT training company IT Intellect, Peter Denny, who also claimed that the problem is getting worse. Denny also pointed out that there are just not enough young adults coming out of school with the ability to move on into the tertiary level and undertake IT, engineering or science-focused degrees or diplomas. Moreover, like the UK, South Africa was losing skills to other countries ‘as young people opt to leave the country to work overseas, due to perceived higher levels of employment, overall opportunities and, frankly, considered safety factors’.