Durban - The new national Monday training regime for maths high school teachers is back on track.
Provincial education departments will be responsible for funding the teacher training, which is set to begin next month.
The National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA (Naptosa) and the SA Onderwysersunie (SAOU) remain opposed to the new training model, arguing that it will fail and create a timetabling “crisis” at schools.
In spite of its financial problems, the KwaZulu-Natal Education Department has committed itself to paying for the “lead teachers” who will facilitate the training, and to reimbursing the participating teachers for expenses including travel and meals.
The training programme is also referred to as the 1+4 model because it divides the working week into one day of learning and four days of teaching.
Nkosinathi Sishi, the head of the KZN Education Department, said he was so keen on the maths teaching intervention that he would support a 2+3 training model.
Next month, Grade 8 and Grade 9 maths teachers will have 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 for the week ahead, they will have to write another test to assess their grasp of the content, and are required to score at least 80%.
Sishi said the province had some good high school teachers who needed little training, but some who should ideally participate in training five days a week.
He said an investment in maths teaching and learning was a priority for his cash-strapped department.
The national education department has spent the past few weeks negotiating the implementation of the new training model with teachers’ unions, which along with prominent school governing body organisations had slammed it because of the disruption to the timetable.
The unions had argued that they should have been consulted before the national department announced (in February) that schools would need to rearrange their timetables to accommodate the use of class time for the training and testing of the teachers.
However, the department announced last week that it had won the support of all the teachers’ unions represented in the Education Labour Relations Council – except Naptosa and SAOU.
When asked to confirm its support, the country’s largest teachers’ union said that any measure intended to assist its members to do their jobs better had its support.
“There are still some issues that must be resolved, but we have never had a problem with any professional development intervention,” SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) deputy general secretary Nkosana Dolopi said.
The National Teachers Union echoed Sadtu, adding that it was pleased the government had agreed to cover the costs of the participating teachers.
The Mercury