Johannesburg - The Basic Education Department has been sitting on a report which details the destructive hold teachers’ unions have had on schools for more than a year.
The report quotes senior education officials from different provinces who reveal the power which teachers’ unions wield over human resources departments to have unqualified teachers appointed to positions of authority, thus undermining efforts to provide quality education to all children.
Some of the officials quoted in the report explicitly accuse the country’s largest teachers’ union, the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) of meddling. It in turn has argued that it was a scapegoat for inept government officials.
The report was authored by the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (Needu), which answers directly to Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga.
This is the second investigation into teaching and learning in South African primary schools undertaken by Needu.
The unit’s 2012 report, which focused on urban schools, revealed that most teachers did not know how to teach pupils to solve numeracy problems or even read.
Why the 2013 report was never officially released by the Basic Education Department, Needu is not saying, but a full copy was leaked to the Independent Media Group earlier this week.
Excerpts of the report, which Independent Media has written about previously, reveal that 11-year-olds in rural areas are being taught to parrot-read, and write too little.
The consequence was that 22 percent of the children in the Needu sample were considered illiterate, and Grade 5 pupils could only manage a mark of four out of 20 on a comprehension test.
For the 2013 report, titled Teaching and Learning in Rural Primary Schools, Needu evaluators interviewed various senior provincial and district education officials, and visited 219 rural schools.
The unit found that senior teachers, such as heads of department and principals, were promoted to positions in district and provincial offices without demonstrating the requisite level of knowledge or management skills.
“A very large part of the problem is that there is pressure to appoint officials to promotion posts using considerations other than merit,” the report states. It quotes a KwaZulu-Natal education official, who reveals that some subject advisers – meant to help teachers understand and deliver the curriculum – were not qualified.
“Some subject advisers have only matric as their highest qualification… The process that was followed to appoint subject advisers following the advertisement was manoeuvred and tampered with.”
A “very senior official” of the Limpopo Education Department told Needu evaluators that it was not uncommon to receive “mandates” from on high.
“You are told to appoint so-and-so regardless of the person’s skills and experience, and if you challenge this you become a black sheep. Once you have mandates you compromise on quality. We are sitting with senior managers who don’t know whether they are coming or going,” the Limpopo official said.
The report warns that, once made, inappropriate appointments retard development for many years, and even decades.
“In a climate of union militancy ... teachers and their curricular concerns are collateral victims in a battle for promotion posts between the union and government,” the report laments.
Across the country, in more than 50 percent of the provincial and district offices visited, Needu evaluators were privy to tales of “inappropriate HR practices”.
Sadtu spokeswoman Nomusa Cembi suggested that Needu spend its time investigating whether all pupils were taught by qualified teachers. Teacher morale, the implementation of the African language policy and whether schools were safe environments, with libraries and laboratories, were also issues to be investigated.
Basic Education spokesman Elijah Mhlanga said that the department had addressed “most” of the matters raised by the report, but was not specific about which recommendations had been taken to heart.
What Needu gives the Basic Education Department credit for:
* No-fee schools. The Funza Lushaka Bursary Programme, which promotes teaching in public schools, enables eligible students to complete a full teaching qualification in an area of national priority. Recipients of these bursaries are required to teach at a public school for the same number of years that they receive the bursary.
* Allowances to teachers working in rural areas.
* The National School Nutrition Programme.
* English Training programmes offered to South African teachers by the British Council.
* Workbooks. Nearly 24 million language and maths workbooks were distributed to children in grades 1 to 9 at the start of the 2013 school year.
* The increasing volume of data available on the schooling system in the last five years.
Mr X’s turnaround strategy
Mr X was a case of exemplary leadership discovered by Needu evaluators.
In 2009, the average matric pass rate for schools in District Z was 28 percent. In 2010 the director was suspended, and Mr X was approached to spend six months turning things around.
On his first day, he met all the principals in the district.
“They asked me three questions. First: ‘Our schools are underfunded, how will you deal with this?’ I said: ‘Changing schools is not just about money, but how to use it.’ The district had more than 200 teachers in excess but no funds for school maintenance.
“Second: ‘How will you change District Z to be a performing district?’ I answered: ‘I am not the principal, you are, and there are clear roles and responsibilities for teachers and principals; you will change the schools, not me.’
“Third: ‘Is it politically correct to bring you here?’ I said: ‘This is not parliament. I am meeting principals to deal with the curriculum; this has nothing to do with politics.’
“The next day I visited a school that had a 3 percent pass rate… I brought a new principal (who is still there now), who was a very good head of department in another school. At the end of the year, the pass rate was 71 percent.
“Every afternoon I called an underperforming school to present their turnaround strategy. Principals must take responsibility and present the plan themselves. Schools don’t need winter schools: they need contact time. On Sundays, we would ask schools to invite all their stakeholders (traditional leaders, healers, pastors, parents) and asked principals to present their results.
“I didn’t want to waste my time getting reports from circuit managers, I went to schools and they (the district officials) followed me.
“I would walk into a staffroom and they didn’t know me, with the teachers eating vetkoeks and gossiping and I would find out exactly what was going on,” said Mr X.
Independent Media