Durban - The plan to assign Mondays for the training of high school maths teachers has been put on ice. The delay is to allow for talks between the Basic Education Department and teachers’ unions, which are opposed to the “radical” new intervention because of the disruption it poses.
The unions argue that they should have been consulted before the department announced that schools should rearrange their timetables to accommodate the use of class time for the training and testing of Grade 8 and Grade 9 maths teachers.
The department aims to push back the implementation date to next month.
“We have meetings planned with all the unions. When done, we will go full steam,” said Basic Education spokesman Elijah Mhlanga.
Anthony Pierce, the head of the National Professional Teachers Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa) in KwaZulu-Natal, said it was “ridiculous” to expect that the training would go ahead, given that there had been no national discussions between labour and the employer.
Allen Thompson, the deputy president of the National Teachers Union (Natu), said that a meeting of the Education Labour Relations Council had been scheduled for Wednesday, and that a second meeting with the Basic Education Department was to take place on Thursday.
“Our reservations are about the lack of consultation. We recognise the need for professional development… But the department must talk to us first,” Thompson said.
He dismissed the suggestion that it was not the disruption to the timetable, but rather the tests that maths teachers would have to submit to which had irked the unions.
“We don’t even know what the content of the tests or the workshops will be,” he said.
Those opposed to the Monday training regime include prominent school governing body associations, the SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) and the SA Onderwysersunie.
The training plan is for maths teachers to gather at a central location on a Monday, where they will be tested on what they ought to be teaching on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. After working through the curriculum, they will have to write another test to assess their grasp of the content, and are required to score at least 80%.
The Mercury