Education access & delivery challenges: Public hearings day 3
Meeting Summary
The Committee heard oral submissions by six entities.
Mr Marius Jooste, Senior Education Specialist in the Department of Education, Gauteng, argued that Outcomes Based Education could work, if the content of the learning areas could be mapped out term by term and week by week. In his opinion too much was left to the discretion of teachers. The content of learning areas had to be more defined and certain milestones had to be reached within a certain time. This approach would also deal with the pace at which the curriculum needed to be taught.
The South African Institute for Distance Education argued that the principle of Open Source computer software should be applied to textbooks and learning materials in the Department of Basic Education. The principle was that the Department would get together a team of experts. They would use good quality existing textbooks and other resources to develop textbooks and workbooks. They would receive a once-off payment for their work. No royalties would be owed to them. The Department would own the copyright to the books. The books would be released in the public domain under the Creative Commons License. The Department could have whole books or parts of books printed as needed. The books would be available free of charge as downloadable files on the website of the Department. Anybody would be able to download the books, adapt them and use them as they pleased, as long as they acknowledged the Department. It would be illegal to sell such a book for profit. This approach would be far more cost effective than the conventional route of buying textbooks. The Department’s budget for learning materials would go much further. This submission also mentioned that only two universities taught education students how to teach learners to read in an African language. Another study found very little evidence of the dedicated teaching of reading in schools.
Junior Achievement Enterprise was an organisation that taught a “Can Do” - attitude and entrepreneurial skills to learners in economically depressed areas. The organization had been working in and alongside schools for many years throughout the country. Its target market was youth from 10 up to 25 years of age. Its submission recommended that its programmes should be integrated in the mainstream school curriculum in order to provide alternatives to learners who were not academically inclined.
Izingane Zethu was a partnership between the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and four other organizations, of which three specialized in Early Childhood Development. Izingane Zethu sought to introduce a model for Early Childhood Development that would reach more children in the rural areas than was currently the case with centre-based Early Childhood Development. The model centred on family facilitators. Family facilitators were given Early Childhood Development training. They then went into communities to find people who were looking after babies and young children. These caregivers and mothers were then recruited to join the programme. The family facilitator spent two days a week with the family in the home, teaching the mother or caregiver the skills of Early Childhood Development. The mother or caregiver then had to continue the Early Childhood Development activities with the baby or young child. The family facilitator also checked whether the child was registered, had a birth certificate, or needed a grant. If there were older people in the household, the family facilitator saw to it that they had documents and could access pensions. The strength of this model was the fact that it could reach far into the remote rural areas, and could accommodate a much larger number of children than centre-based Early Childhood Development.
Lawyers for Human Rights and the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa submitted that the South African Constitution, as well as international treaties to which South Africa was a signatory, asserted the universal right to basic education for all children. However, many children of asylum seekers and refugees did not have access to education; 24% of such children of school going age did not attend school. The reasons ranged from the inability to afford school fees, transport, and books, and overcrowded schools, to the lack of documentation. It was recommended that lawmakers remove legal obstacles to refugee children’s accessing education, to allow children without South African birth certificates into schools, and to train school communities to recognise documentation used to enrol foreign children. Also tolerance of multicultural populations was to be encouraged.
Education Support Services Trust recommended that Outcomes Based Education remain, but that teachers had to acquire a love and enthusiasm for learning. The teacher had to impart this love for learning to the learner. The teacher then mediated learning, and allowed the learner to teach himself through his interaction with the learning resource. Group work was encouraged and the learner was accountable to his peers and himself to do his work. The Trust claimed that learners who participated in its programme achieved an average of 40% more than learners from similar schools who did not participate in the programme.
The Chairperson was appalled that children emerged from the public school system unable to read or write.
She called for daily literacy periods, as opposed to merely focusing on specific subjects, particularly in the foundation phase. There was something fundamentally wrong with the focus on the advanced aspects while the basics were neglected. She asked for the studies about literacy teaching to be forwarded to the Committee. She said that both the Bill of Rights and the South African schools Act envisaged universal access to school. In practice this ideal was not realized. The wording in Section 21 of the Schools Act was ambiguous. She suggested that some schools in areas where there were high densities of migrants and refugees be re-categorized as no-fee schools. She asked for the names of schools and districts and areas from where complaints of xenophobia emanated. She said that she and another African National Congress Member could not understand exactly what the Education Support Services Trust was proposing and how practical it would be. An African National Congress Member asked how the alternatives that the Education Support Services Trust were proposing, like two hour long periods, could be practically accommodated in an ordinary school, where four to five learning areas had to be taught every day. Another African National Congress Member asked why the entrepreneurship training that Junior Achievement Enterprise offered had not started at grade one already. A Democratic Alliance Member asked how the burden could be eased on quintile five schools that had large numbers of learners who could not afford the school fees, because they were refugees and asylum seekers.
Meeting report
The Committee continued with its Oral Hearings on Delivery of Quality Education in South Africa.
Gauteng. Department of Education. Making Outcomes Based Education (OBE) work. submission
Mr Marius Jooste, Senior Education Specialist, Department of Education, Gauteng, said that the fragmented approach to implementing OBE and its assessment had left school and many teachers confused. Mr Jooste’s school had managed to implement OBE successfully to a degree that was acceptable to teachers. The school had achieved this through continuous curriculum development; filling gaps in the curriculum and the way it was assessed to match existing standards and practices; keeping teachers positive by relating change to what they already knew and did; creating simple documentation that worked and made their tasks easier so that they could focus on their key task of teaching; embracing change and development in education and the curriculum with a level-headed approach.
Many valuable teachers who simply could not cope had rather opted to teach at private institutions. Private institutions implemented the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) but allowed their teachers to retain their professional identity and trusted that they were the experts in their fields. These teachers continued to teach what they knew was important. Today these schools had managed to maintain their standards by continuing to focus on the importance of content; allowing their teachers to continue playing an important role in teaching and learning; retaining old practices of doing a variety of types of activities and assessing learners through a variety of forms of assessment; always placing emphasis on the importance of continuous assessment; and identifying the importance of assisting learners in dealing with barriers. Tests and examinations still played a major role.
The important thing about bringing change was always to relate change to what was already done. With the introduction of OBE, it was interesting that for a new democracy, we chose the following approaches to implementing a new curriculum for all: the foreign in preference to the local; “outside to inside”; “top to bottom”; and the “unknown to known” approach. The result was that we did not relate change to what teachers knew and in which they had been trained. Teachers were left confused and insecure.
Many principals tried to compensate for their insecurities about the curriculum by sending their teachers on courses and dealing with the problem by “sending their best sheep to be slaughtered”. Only the very dynamic principals who retained their hand-on approach and still stood in the class, bothered to deal with the problems head-on. At Mr Jooste’s current school teachers and learners were fortunate to have such a principal.
The current South African curriculum and the curriculum statements were amongst the best found in the world. The curriculum statements covered a wide range of knowledge, skills and values for each grade and in most instances did address to a certain extent learner progression within each outcomes. However it had proven to be very difficult for teachers to work with it in its current form. Some of the areas which had proven to be problematic included the language used in the National Curriculum Statements. These were not what teachers were used to and they found it difficult to identify the knowledge, skills and values within them which they were used to teaching their learners. One had to be very proficient in language and in this case English to interpret the correct meaning in each Outcomes and Assessment Standard.
The manner in which the statements had integrated knowledge, skills and values, often within the same Assessment Standard, called for a specific interpretation, often not envisaged by the teacher and often in a combination which did not make sense to the teacher and therefore was not easily interpreted into usable activities. This rendered it unusable.
There was often not a natural progression within the statements and teachers found that they were selecting Assessment Standards at random to try and keep to what they thought the progression should be and what their learners might need to know before progressing to new work.
Generally it was found that far too much decision making of what they needed to teach, in which order it must be taught and which skills were important before the next skill was taught, was left up to the teacher. In discussions with other colleagues, it was noted that most competent teachers felt insecure about whether they were interpreting the Assessment Standards correctly and whether they were teaching the right knowledge, skills and values at the right time. Even textbook publishers all seemed to have their own varied interpretation.
One of the biggest point of confusion, which started with Curriculum 2005 and was expended to a certain extend into the NCS, was the aspect of integration. Initially the idea was created, with Curriculum 2005, that full integration was required – teachers had to teach all learning areas.
The general abuse of terminology had also played an important role in the confusion and failure of OBE. Many concepts and ideas had been imported and implemented as if nothing existed before. This had left teachers with the impression that new ideas and concepts had been introduced, only to find upon further investigation that many of the concepts and ideas existed in schools. This confused schools as they were not able to spot similarities because no one had bothered to investigate what was already being done in schools.
There was consensus among teachers that the eight Learning Areas as currently taught in our schools should remain. The presentation of the Learning Areas Assessment Standards in the current integrated format should be rewritten to clearly distinguish what knowledge, skills and values should be taught in each Learning Area and each Grade.
Mr Jooste proposed what he called “3 in 1 Task Planning”. Task Planning would greatly eliminate much of the current paperwork done by teachers. It would require at least three levels of planning: the Learning Programme, the Work Schedule, and Lesson Plans.
Something taken over from the old system was lesson plans. Most teachers failed to see the practical use of lesson plans. Most of the information required in them was obvious and showed a lack of educational knowledge and did not promote learning. They must be scrapped or simplified and standardized. Mr Jooste wanted to shelf the lesson plan in favour of the Task Planner. The idea behind task planning referred to the number of tasks and activities re done to determine a learner’s level of achievement, whether these activities were formal or informal. Even these two concepts could be confusing because even formal activities were proposed to be dealt with informally.
There should be Clear Assessment Guidelines which addressed the realities in schools, helping make assessment accurate and reliable. Skills-based activities should be assessed during each term. There should be formal exam-type activity based on the core content at the end of each term. There should be one formal systemic assessment based on the core knowledge at the end of the year. Assessment guidelines must clearly address the needs of learners in each phase and in each Learning Area. Learning Areas such as Arts and Culture and Life Orientation which were formative in nature should have limited formal assessments and should be dealt with in a practical manner. Learners should be encouraged to express themselves.
Assessment was to determine learners’ level of progress, to inform parents, and to determine competence in a grade. It was necessary to keep this simple and uncomplicated - Grade R-3: 4 point scale; and Grade 4-12: percentages only, no codes, no symbols.
The curriculum should not be re-written; there should just be a skilful separation, review and expansion of current core knowledge, skills and values for each learning area. There should be a simplification of the planning process with single level contextual or thematic “Task Planning”. There should be simplification of assessment using percentages; accurate weighting of formal continuous (skills and values based) assessments and formal summative (examination type) assessments, and clear requirements for promotion.
Discussion
The Chairperson asked Mr Jooste to explain more about the educational environment that formed the background to his submission. She asked how many other education specialists there were and whether there were enough in Gauteng.
She asked what process needed to be embarked upon to adequately map out the contents of the curriculum. She felt that, if that process could be done correctly, teachers would have clearly marked milestones to map out what should be achieved for a particular academic year, and the pace at which it should happen.
The Chairperson said that she was flabbergasted every time she learnt that children who came through the public school system could not read or write. According to her logic, all children should come out of foundation phase education able to read.
She asked whether the Department of Education should look at interventions like introducing daily literacy periods, as opposed to merely focusing on specific subjects, particularly for the foundation phase. She said that there was something fundamentally wrong with the focus that the Department of Education placed on the advanced aspects, while the basics were suffering.
Dr J Kloppers-Laurens (DA) said that Mr Jooste claimed that the Outcomes Based Education (OBE) curriculum was of an international standard, but, she asked, who designed it initially? She asked whether it had been piloted in the schools and whether the teachers had been trained. Were there a set of criteria according to which these curricula were designed? It linked up with the Chairperson’s question about the process. Who was going to do the revision? Would it be piloted? Was the Department going to train the teachers? Why did this problem exist in the first place? It should have been done right in the first place.
Ms A Mashishi (ANC) had a question about task planning. When she checked she only saw ‘group of learners’. Was it part of the assessment? Were the learners assessed only in groups or individually as well? Mr Jooste spoke about the interpretation that was not clear. What was his proposal in that regard? Lastly, he said that the content was lacking. She needed him to elaborate.
Mr Jooste replied that each district had a Curriculum Delivery and Support Unit. It was then divided into phases: Foundation, Intermediate, Senior, and Further Education and Training (FET).There was a Senior Education Specialist for each learning area in each phase.
For the Foundation phase there would be Senior Specialists for Numeracy, Literacy and Lifeskills. There would be one for Assessment as well as a Coordinator who coordinated that specific subunit. It went up to matric level. FET had a co-coordinator /facilitator for each learning area or each subject with a coordinator and assessment specialist for each phase. That was basically how the Department was structured.
Mr Jooste believed that although there were vacancies, most districts were adequately staffed to carry out their mandate. In Gauteng all Senior Education Specialists currently had the opportunity to apply for state-subsidised cars. Previously transport was a major challenge for Specialists to get to the schools they needed to visit in order to do their work.
Generally speaking the working conditions for Senior Education Specialists were good. They only experienced a lot of resistance from the unions. There was a lock-out in Alexandra for the last two weeks. They were not allowed to go into any school in that area, as a result of the influence of the union. The unions did not allow the Department of Education’s officials to enter classrooms in the schools, where they needed to be in order to assist and support teachers. Facilitators should be in classrooms with teachers, but if they were not allowed in, they could only check the documentation and leave, with no interaction, which was counterproductive. This situation created a situation where problems were not identified, attended to, and thus were never solved.
Content could easily be mapped out by specialists in their fields. There was a programme where all learning areas were neatly mapped out and teachers had set structures to follow and knew exactly what they had to achieve for any given academic term and by extension, year.
What he was proposing was a similar system where the content was mapped out, and the teacher could then term by term measure the learner’s knowledge, skills and values.
Literacy and the Language Policies in the schools were very complex, because there were 11 official languages. Learners were taught in their mother tongue up to grade 3. It could be any language. From grade 4 most were taught in English. Without an English background, the results were disastrous. The grade 4 teachers had a big problem, because in terms of the promotion requirements and the legislation, they could not fail the whole class. There was too much documentation to complete and they rather left it and those learners progressed, without having mastered the curriculum in grade 4. This continued and they found themselves, in grade 7, unable to read in English.
He said that he thought that the policy had changed to say that all learners had to start learning English in grade 1, so that they at least had a background by the time they reached grade 4 and had to switch to English as the language of instruction.
The curriculum was in line with OBE curricula around the world. The problem was that content was not very clear. There were some learning areas where there was recommended and suggested content, but it did not show enough detail for teachers to know exactly what must be done from term to term.
As far as he knew the curriculum was not piloted and if it was piloted, it was done in selected schools. He was not sure whether this Committee was responsible for the review part, but it had to happen.
Learners did activities in various ways. Activities were done in groups, in pairs and individually. OBE did encourage group work and facilitated learners doing work in groups. Sometimes teachers had to assess the learners’ abilities to work in pairs or in groups. Most recorded assessments done during the term, had to be marked by the teacher and were done individually, but could also be done in pairs and groups. Group work was an important skill that learners had to learn.
The Chairperson referred to Mr Jooste’s reference to legislation that prevented teachers from failing a whole class, even though nobody was ready to move on to the next level. She wanted to know where the legislation was recorded and asked Mr Jooste to forward the reference to the Committee Secretary. In her opinion the education system was doing the learner a disservice if that was the case.
Mr Jooste said that the national Department of Education had designed OBE education.
The Chairperson said that there was a curriculum review process underway and she hoped that Mr Jooste, as a Senior Education Specialist in the Department of Education, Gauteng, was very involved in it. She said that his submission would be forwarded to the Department and that his recommendations had been echoed in many other submissions. She thanked him and wished him and his colleagues well.
The national Department of Basic Education reported that the assessment policy was captured in a policy linked to the curriculum and stated that no learner should repeat a year more than once in a particular phase and that learners should progress with their age group and should not be held back too much.
She said that OBE was developed by a broad based team consisting of school teachers and education specialists.
The South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE). Submission
Ms Jenny Glennie, Director, South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE), said that the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) was a not-for-profit organisation, established in 1992, with an overall mission to help create equitable and meaningful access to knowledge, learning, and skills through the adoption of open learning principles and distance education methods. SAIDE appreciated the opportunity to make its following submission, based on our professional work and experience.
SAIDE believed that curriculum and schooling, despite many attempts at reform and equitable funding, still did not adequately meet the needs of the majority of learners in our country, the mainstream. It therefore welcomed this call for comment, and the intention to revise the school curriculum in the light of written submissions on aspects affecting quality outcomes in primary and high schools.
SAIDE recommended rationalising and clarifying the functions of the various kinds of support material for the implementation of the curriculum, and also supported the idea in the Review Report (DoE, 2009, page 51) that ‘the textbook (is) one of the most effective tools through which to deliver the curriculum and support assessment.’ However, SAIDE thought that there needed to be greater clarity about the functions of the various kinds of curriculum and support material. At the moment the lack of clarity in the focus of the various support material and the often contradictory messages they gave resulted in confusion. Learner workbooks (for Grades R to 3) should contain sequenced and comprehensive sets of learner activities, but teachers’ effective mediation of these activities was critical. For Grades R to 3, workbooks could not be as central as textbooks to the communication of the curriculum at these levels, because the learners’ literacy skills were not strong enough to access them independently. Teacher guides needed to give concrete guidance on what was assessed, why it was assessed and how, including examples of particular subjects, phases and grades, linked to the textbooks / learner workbooks.
SAIDE recommended exploiting the potential of Open Educational Resources in a coordinated approach to the provision of textbooks. The current system for selecting textbooks was not efficient. Departmental processes for approving textbooks were cumbersome and time-consuming, and schools were usually not in a position to make informed choices.
SAIDE proposed that the Department request a team of subject/learning area experts to survey existing textbooks in each grade/subject, identify strong elements across them, and build from them a core textbook for each grade and subject.
SAIDE proposed that the Department then review and nationally approve these core textbooks and release them as Open Educational Resources under a Creative Commons licence on its website or on Thutong.
SAIDE proposed that the Department request publishers to customize and design textbooks for particular contexts, building on the core textbooks; print them; and distribute them.
The publishers could also contribute a great deal in the development and distribution of detailed Teacher Guides, which could accompany the textbooks, and assist teachers to mediate them.
This would mean that the core textbooks would be freely downloadable, and those teachers who had the skills and access to the internet could take and adapt the activities for the particular needs of their learners. However, the vast majority of teachers would have textbooks attractively designed and customized for their context which built on the nationally approved core textbook. The needs of mainstream schools would be met, while at the same time the energies/skills/creativity of teachers in more privileged contexts could be given scope.
Publishers would compete with each other in terms of design, printing and distribution, rather than in terms of the core content. The Department would have control of the core content, and the issue of adjustment of materials ‘during periods of curriculum and assessment reform’ (DoE, 2009. page 51) would be greatly facilitated by their digital format. The Department would simply have to update the core textbooks digitally, and serve notice that this had been done.
SAIDE proposed that the practice of integration be retained while rationalising subjects/learning areas. SAIDE acknowledged the challenges that the shift from learning areas to ‘subjects’ was attempting to address and it supported these attempts. Nonetheless it believed that integration was an important teaching and learning principle. For this reason it recommended that examples of integrated teaching and learning be included in the teacher guides, textbooks, and workbooks. In particular, in the workbooks for the Foundation Phase, integration of literacy and numeracy into the General Studies subjects was critical.
SAIDE also suggested that Religious and Moral Education, or perhaps more appropriately, Values Education, be included from the Foundation Phase, in an integrated manner. The current introduction of religious and moral education only from the Intermediate Phase was a little odd.
SAIDE proposed that the de facto situation in which Grade 7 was an extension of the intermediate phase rather than the first year of senior phase be acknowledged
We suggest that the recommendations made in the Review Report (DoE, 2009, page 50) for the intermediate phase apply to Grade 7, in line with the physical and de facto organization of Grade 7 in the intermediate phase in most schools.
SAIDE proposed a move to greater standardisation of initial teacher education and that the essentials of reading instruction methodology and teachers’ own language improvement be put in the foreground. Many of the challenges facing schools could be addressed by greater standardisation of initial teacher education programmes. Reading instruction in African languages in teacher education programmes was crucial, but not provided in the initial teacher education programmes of most higher education institutions. Methods of reading instruction for English and Afrikaans were not adequate for the teaching of reading instruction in African languages, because the structure and availability of resources in the languages differed vastly.
SAIDE also supported moves to provide student teachers with teaching practice experience in a range of different contexts. There seemed often to be a mismatch between the type of practical teaching experience that students had while studying and the realities of mainstream schools. Graduates from programmes often found themselves unprepared for working in schools that typically lacked infrastructure, lacked teaching and learning resources and had high learner to teacher ratios. Trainee teachers must be equipped and supported to work in those environments through their teacher education programmes.
SAIDE proposed conceptualising teacher development as a distributed responsibility across the system as a whole. Teacher development recommendations should support the emerging vision for a de-centralised coordinated approach to teacher education and development.
In terms of this vision, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) did not work in isolation to deliver initial teacher education. Nor was it up to district personnel on their own to offer curriculum training. HEIs could also work with district officials through Teacher Development Centres (TDCs) to offer curriculum training and inset. In addition, SAIDE proposed that NGOs could partner with HEIs and district officials in supporting the TDCs. These Teacher Development Centres in turn were associated with Professional Development Schools (PDSs) which were centres of good practice for school-based teacher development and for induction of new teachers to the profession. In other words, different parts of the system work together to provide professional development for teachers from recruitment to retirement. If a whole system approach to teacher development were adopted, the current problems with the disjuncture between what happened in initial teacher training programmes and what was expected of teachers in the classroom could be resolved.
The implications of this include a much greater role for schools. There was a need to develop school leaders and managers as well as district officials in curriculum leadership.
SAIDE proposed providing a structured support for addressing socio-economic barriers to learning.
The Department of Education, Education White Paper 6 on Inclusive Education (DoE: 2001) was rooted in the recognition that a range of needs existed among learners and within the education system. But a significant shift in paradigm was still needed. It was the majority of learners in mainstream schools that needed support.
SAIDE believed that it was imperative that mechanisms or strategies are structured into the system to overcome existing barriers. Such mechanisms must develop the capacity of the system to overcome barriers which might arise, prevent barriers from occurring, and promote the development of an effective learning and teaching environment. All the attempts to improve and revise and streamline the curriculum would come to naught if this is not done.
Specific recommendations in this regard included extending the school day to a full seven hours. This could help to resolve a number of challenges in accessing education, including additional time for academic support and homework; appropriate resourced environments in which to do homework; strengthening and enhancing the national nutrition programme; and integrating the current ‘after’ school programmes, including sport, into the school day.
SAIDE proposed creating greater access to social support. Investigations into various projects aimed at supporting vulnerable learners all pointed to the urgent need to strengthen access to social support. Given the inability of many families to meet basic needs such as nutrition and shelter, and given r knowledge that under-nourishment led to a lack of concentration and a range of other symptoms which affected the ability of the learner to engage effectively in the learning process, the current National Schools Nutrition Programme (NSNP) needed to be considerably strengthened.
Schools should be innovative enough to develop strategies that provided more flexible ways of helping vulnerable learners remain in school and realise academic success. This role was becoming more and more important as the numbers of such “at risk” learners were increasing due to poverty and HIV/AIDS.
Discussion
The Chairperson said that she found many of the ideas and postulations that Ms Glennie had put forward sound and the issue of the workbooks was something that the Committee had raised with the Department a long time ago.
There were many aspects of Ms Glennie’s presentation that she found quite intriguing amongst which was the idea of open source learning materials. She asked Ms Glennie to explain what the legal challenges were regarding this concept in the South African context around textbooks in particular. The Minister had said that the Department would look at a centralized procurement system as currently there was no system and no uniformity regarding the procurement of textbooks. This was a financial decision and content was not considered.
The concepts of caring schools and homework classes would satisfy an existing need amongst learners, because many had no space at home to do their homework or study, and many had no facilities to do research for assignments and projects. It was an idea that was adopted informally in some communities, but not necessarily everywhere.
Dr Kloppers-Lourens referred to the slide numbered 3 in the presentation, the fourth bullet point where it said: “Integration of sport and cultural activities into the school day”. She said that she read over in the weekend newspapers that there was a draft policy on sport. She asked Ms Glennie to elaborate on that point.
The Chairperson returned to the issue of literacy. She referred to a footnote on page 5 of the submission that stated that research found that only two universities were offering reading instruction in an African language. Other research found very little evidence of dedicated teaching of reading in schools. She asked whether universities were training teachers on how to teach reading. She said that if SAIDE had empirical studies to show this, she would like to be informed, because this issue had to feature in the Committee’s report.
With the current text books, the copyright belonged to the publishers and one was not allowed to copy or re-use. But it was possible that one could, through the Department of Basic Education, assemble a group of experts from the field that could work together and develop a core text which would not belong to the publisher. Those people should be resourced to develop the materials really well. She cited the Open University, United Kingdom, as an institution which was renowned for its curriculum development, because it spent extensive time and energy into developing those materials which were then used throughout that country. She suggested a similar process here to have the team develop good textbooks grounded in the classroom. The team of experts had to be paid for their work, but they would never receive royalties. This work would then be released under the creative commons license. It would be made available on a digital platform for free and people could use it and adapt it as they pleased. It could be printed as a whole or in part, at a provincial or district level. There would be no legal difficulties as the Department would own the copyright but it would license anybody to use it and to adapt it as long as the user attributed it to the Department. There was in existence a legal framework in which one could do this. It was called the Creative Commons Licence. This meant that the money allocated for learning resources could go much further.
It was really about thinking about an integrated day in which all children would be doing academic work, sport, and cultural activities throughout the day. Teachers would not be teaching all day necessarily. They would have free periods. It was about having a structure for children, most whose parents were working all day. There was also infrastructure available at school which did not in many cases exist at home. Teachers had to work seven hours a day. It could create a mind-shift and contribute towards creating a caring school. She felt strongly that this concept had to be explored.
The Centre for Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Pretoria found that very few universities taught student teachers how to teach children how to read in their home languages. Without that foundation, the country was in a very difficult position. The fact that students at these institutions were from different language backgrounds made it difficult, but there was a need to address this issue. SAIDE was working with the University of Pretoria in this regard with their Foundation Phase teachers teaching Sepedi and Setswana with Afrikaans as a second language. It had been found that in other countries foundation phase teachers spent two and a half hours per week on literacy teaching. In South Africa it was one hour.
The Chairperson asked Ms Glennie to look for the studies about literacy teaching and to make it available to the Committee. She thanked Ms Glennie for her submission.
Junior Achievement South Africa. Submission
The Chairperson said that she found many of the ideas and postulations that Ms Glennie had put forward sound and the issue of the workbooks was something that the Committee had raised with the Department a long time ago.
There were many aspects of Ms Glennie’s presentation that she found quite intriguing amongst which was the idea of open source learning materials. She asked Ms Glennie to explain what the legal challenges were regarding this concept in the South African context around textbooks in particular. The Minister had said that the Department would look at a centralized procurement system as currently there was no system and no uniformity regarding the procurement of textbooks. This was a financial decision and content was not considered.
The concepts of caring schools and homework classes would satisfy an existing need amongst learners, because many had no space at home to do their homework or study, and many had no facilities to do research for assignments and projects. It was an idea that was adopted informally in some communities, but not necessarily everywhere.
Dr Kloppers-Lourens referred to the slide numbered 3 in the presentation, the fourth bullet point where it said: “Integration of sport and cultural activities into the school day”. She said that she read over in the weekend newspapers that there was a draft policy on sport. She asked Ms Glennie to elaborate on that point.
The Chairperson returned to the issue of literacy. She referred to a footnote on page 5 of the submission that stated that research found that only two universities were offering reading instruction in an African language. Other research found very little evidence of dedicated teaching of reading in schools. She asked whether universities were training teachers on how to teach reading. She said that if SAIDE had empirical studies to show this, she would like to be informed, because this issue had to feature in the Committee’s report.
With the current text books, the copyright belonged to the publishers and one was not allowed to copy or re-use. But it was possible that one could, through the Department of Basic Education, assemble a group of experts from the field that could work together and develop a core text which would not belong to the publisher. Those people should be resourced to develop the materials really well. She cited the Open University, United Kingdom, as an institution which was renowned for its curriculum development, because it spent extensive time and energy into developing those materials which were then used throughout that country. She suggested a similar process here to have the team develop good textbooks grounded in the classroom. The team of experts had to be paid for their work, but they would never receive royalties. This work would then be released under the creative commons license. It would be made available on a digital platform for free and people could use it and adapt it as they pleased. It could be printed as a whole or in part, at a provincial or district level. There would be no legal difficulties as the Department would own the copyright but it would license anybody to use it and to adapt it as long as the user attributed it to the Department. There was in existence a legal framework in which one could do this. It was called the Creative Commons Licence. This meant that the money allocated for learning resources could go much further.
It was really about thinking about an integrated day in which all children would be doing academic work, sport, and cultural activities throughout the day. Teachers would not be teaching all day necessarily. They would have free periods. It was about having a structure for children, most whose parents were working all day. There was also infrastructure available at school which did not in many cases exist at home. Teachers had to work seven hours a day. It could create a mind-shift and contribute towards creating a caring school. She felt strongly that this concept had to be explored.
The Centre for Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Pretoria found that very few universities taught student teachers how to teach children how to read in their home languages. Without that foundation, the country was in a very difficult position. The fact that students at these institutions were from different language backgrounds made it difficult, but there was a need to address this issue. SAIDE was working with the University of Pretoria in this regard with their Foundation Phase teachers teaching Sepedi and Setswana with Afrikaans as a second language. It had been found that in other countries foundation phase teachers spent two and a half hours per week on literacy teaching. In South Africa it was one hour.
The Chairperson asked Ms Glennie to look for the studies about literacy teaching and to make it available to the Committee. She thanked Ms Glennie for her submission.
Junior Achievement South Africa. Submission
Ms Linda McClure, Managing Director, Junior Achievement South Africa (SA), advocated the inclusion of business and entrepreneurial programmes in the school curriculum to provide a more holistic education experience and to provide for those learners who struggled with the extremely academic nature of the current curriculum. She spoke of the provision of additional skills over and above and perhaps in some cases in place of the current school curriculum, and providing for young people to become economically active and responsible citizens.
Junior Achievement SA programmes were all focussed on addressing the key issues of financial literacy, workplace readiness, and above all, entrepreneurship, incorporating accounting, marketing and business skills.
It was Junior Achievement SA’s considered belief over 30 years of experience, that the school system was failing learners who struggled with the purely academic nature of the current curriculum; which did not provide for practical skills to foster the deep understanding and management of economics, business, accounting and entrepreneurship; which was extremely academic in nature, contributing to the high matric failure rate; and which did not offer learners an alternative to tertiary education and employment, which for many, for various reasons, was simply unattainable in any event.
Junior Achievement SA programmes addressed the key issues of numeracy, financial literacy and accounting across the school curriculum as well as soft skills such as social responsibility, ethics and personal responsibility, while instilling a “can do” positive attitude. Participating learners, when asked what surprised them about the programme, responded “that I could do it” – that it was indeed possible to start and manage a small business with all the responsibilities that are associated with it – a definite shift to a “can do” attitude which spilt over into all other aspects of their lives.
Junior Achievement SA’s impact had already been immense although it currently reached less than 1% of learners between the ages of 10 and 18. Junior Achievement SA’s impact was evidenced by a more positive approach and attitude to school work among participants. For example, an alumnus of its Mini Enterprise Programme was running an extremely successful panel beating business at OR Tambo airport, the only panel beating business in the world attached to an airport where vehicles could be repaired during “down time” while parked. He was currently expanding the business to the Cape Town and Durban airports. A further example was Sthembiso Tshabalala, who had funded his entire university education through the running of small businesses through skills he acquired through participation in Junior Achievement SA’s programmes.
Junior Achievement SA’s programmes were currently offered as extra mural optional activities, and were an easy fit into the current curriculum, either as a component of the life skills curriculum or economics and management sciences.
Through participation in our programmes, not only were learners better equipped to manage the mainstream subjects of economics, maths and accounting but were better equipped to face their personal economic challenges when they left school, such as inability to obtain employment or study further. They would be fully equipped to start their own businesses. Programmes had been suitably adapted for both rural and urban application, taking into account the specific challenges facing the rural learner. With programmes running in deep rural areas such as Banksdrift and Qwa Qwa, these programmes emphasised the economic opportunities within the rural environment.
Discussion
The Chairperson said that one of the submissions of the previous day had been from the School of Skills in Cape Town, where the instruction was towards equipping the learners with a vocational skill instead of a matric certificate, which was only useful if one intended studying further. At the moment the throughput and flow through the school system was not something the country could be proud of, as many learners left school before completing matric or failed. The reasons for this were many and complex, but part of the reason had to be the fact that the school system did not cater for learners that were more practically orientated. She understood the submission to address that gap in the system. She said that, because of the country’s past there were no entrepreneurial role models to emulate. In other societies there was a natural process of young people being taken up in family businesses or starting their own. The absence of entrepreneurial training also limit young people’s thinking as to what was possible. She asked Ms McClure to sketch the background of the organization.
Ms A Mashishi (ANC) asked why the programme did not start at grade 1, instead of grades 4 to 7. She also asked about the ages of the young people involved.
Ms McClure said that the programmes were offered to people from 10 to 25 years of age. In the Sasolburg and Secunda area in Mpumalanga there was a group of young people who have not completed their schooling, but they were too old to attend day school. She said that the programmes for grade 1 were still being developed. She said that the reason for the success of the programme was that they reached young people at an early age.
She said that Junior Achievement Enterprise was part of an international organization that had been in existence for 90 years. They were working in 123 countries all over the world of which 18 were in Africa. The South African branch was the oldest in Africa at 30 years of age. The organization worked across the country in urban and rural areas. The method of working was to have a small team at the head office in Johannesburg on a full time basis and to contract people in the various areas to execute their programme. The company set stringent standards when selecting the people whom they contracted. They also selected local people who knew the communities that they worked in very well.
She illustrated the importance of this point with an anecdote where they tried to run a workshop combining two schools from different residential areas in Johannesburg. It was a disaster, because the children hated each other.
She agreed that role models were important. The organization tried to get entrepreneurs to speak to the children whom the children could identify with. Richard Branson and Bill Gates were outside their frame of reference, but Richard Maponya who started Maponya Mall they could identify with. The focus for the organization was to bring about a change in attitude in the child so that the child learnt to think a bit broader. It this could be inculcated at a young age, they became functional economically active citizens.
There was a bridging school called Eden Campus in Sedgefield. The young people had passed matric, but not very well and their prospects were limited. The bridging school was providing them with additional English and mathematics classes and Junior Achievement Enterprise was providing them with business training. One of the fallacies and beliefs that these young people had was that they could not do anything and this programme changed that belief. They also believed that they could not do anything without money. This particular group had to raise money to start their business. One member of the group was called Godgiven. His fundraising effort was to walk around asking people whether he could give them a blessing for R5.00. He raised R250 in this manner. This illustrated how the programme changed the myths and fallacies and how it empowered and mobilized participants.
There was a young man who attended a school in Hazyview, Mpumalanga. He was part of a programme sponsored by SPAR. He showed such good leadership qualities in the programme that SPAR employed him on a part time basis during school holidays. They would probably employ him when he completed his schooling.
In the mainstream school system, somebody who was not coping, would pull back and not participate. The potential of that person would then be lost, unless there could be an alternative way for the person to discover and demonstrate their strengths.
There was a young man from one of the slums outside Nairobi whose whole class was killed during the riots. Despite his difficult circumstances and past, he was doing very well. He was running a small business making and selling bracelets. This organization offered mentorship and support and put them in touch with other organizations that could assist them further.
The Chairperson cited the example of Tony Factor, a man who was dyslexic and could not learn in the conventional way, who became one of the most successful entrepreneurs of his time. She thanked Ms McClure for her submission. She said that she would like the Department to create some kind of accreditation system and create a database of organizations like this one, so that it would be available to other schools which required the type of services that the organization offered.
Izingane Zethu Partnership. Improving Basic Education. Submission
The Chairperson said that one of the submissions of the previous day had been from the School of Skills in Cape Town, where the instruction was towards equipping the learners with a vocational skill instead of a matric certificate, which was only useful if one intended studying further. At the moment the throughput and flow through the school system was not something the country could be proud of, as many learners left school before completing matric or failed. The reasons for this were many and complex, but part of the reason had to be the fact that the school system did not cater for learners that were more practically orientated. She understood the submission to address that gap in the system. She said that, because of the country’s past there were no entrepreneurial role models to emulate. In other societies there was a natural process of young people being taken up in family businesses or starting their own. The absence of entrepreneurial training also limit young people’s thinking as to what was possible. She asked Ms McClure to sketch the background of the organization.
Ms A Mashishi (ANC) asked why the programme did not start at grade 1, instead of grades 4 to 7. She also asked about the ages of the young people involved.
Ms McClure said that the programmes were offered to people from 10 to 25 years of age. In the Sasolburg and Secunda area in Mpumalanga there was a group of young people who have not completed their schooling, but they were too old to attend day school. She said that the programmes for grade 1 were still being developed. She said that the reason for the success of the programme was that they reached young people at an early age.
She said that Junior Achievement Enterprise was part of an international organization that had been in existence for 90 years. They were working in 123 countries all over the world of which 18 were in Africa. The South African branch was the oldest in Africa at 30 years of age. The organization worked across the country in urban and rural areas. The method of working was to have a small team at the head office in Johannesburg on a full time basis and to contract people in the various areas to execute their programme. The company set stringent standards when selecting the people whom they contracted. They also selected local people who knew the communities that they worked in very well.
She illustrated the importance of this point with an anecdote where they tried to run a workshop combining two schools from different residential areas in Johannesburg. It was a disaster, because the children hated each other.
She agreed that role models were important. The organization tried to get entrepreneurs to speak to the children whom the children could identify with. Richard Branson and Bill Gates were outside their frame of reference, but Richard Maponya who started Maponya Mall they could identify with. The focus for the organization was to bring about a change in attitude in the child so that the child learnt to think a bit broader. It this could be inculcated at a young age, they became functional economically active citizens.
There was a bridging school called Eden Campus in Sedgefield. The young people had passed matric, but not very well and their prospects were limited. The bridging school was providing them with additional English and mathematics classes and Junior Achievement Enterprise was providing them with business training. One of the fallacies and beliefs that these young people had was that they could not do anything and this programme changed that belief. They also believed that they could not do anything without money. This particular group had to raise money to start their business. One member of the group was called Godgiven. His fundraising effort was to walk around asking people whether he could give them a blessing for R5.00. He raised R250 in this manner. This illustrated how the programme changed the myths and fallacies and how it empowered and mobilized participants.
There was a young man who attended a school in Hazyview, Mpumalanga. He was part of a programme sponsored by SPAR. He showed such good leadership qualities in the programme that SPAR employed him on a part time basis during school holidays. They would probably employ him when he completed his schooling.
In the mainstream school system, somebody who was not coping, would pull back and not participate. The potential of that person would then be lost, unless there could be an alternative way for the person to discover and demonstrate their strengths.
There was a young man from one of the slums outside Nairobi whose whole class was killed during the riots. Despite his difficult circumstances and past, he was doing very well. He was running a small business making and selling bracelets. This organization offered mentorship and support and put them in touch with other organizations that could assist them further.
The Chairperson cited the example of Tony Factor, a man who was dyslexic and could not learn in the conventional way, who became one of the most successful entrepreneurs of his time. She thanked Ms McClure for her submission. She said that she would like the Department to create some kind of accreditation system and create a database of organizations like this one, so that it would be available to other schools which required the type of services that the organization offered.
Izingane Zethu Partnership. Improving Basic Education. Submission
Izingane Zethu (Our Children) was a partnership between Nelson Mandela Children Fund (NMCF), Training Resources and Early Childhood Education (TREE), The Valley Trust (TVT), Little Elephant Training Centre for Early Education (LETCEE) and Kwangcolosi Child and Family Care Centre (KCFC) established in 2002. The programme was being implemented in the three districts of Kwazulu Natal (KZN), Sisonke, Ilembe and Mzinyathi.
The Izingane Zethu programme responded to problems affecting children and young people with a distinctive emphasis on children below the age of 6 years by continuously emphasising strong families, care and protection of children, access to services (health care, education, birth registration), awareness through advocacy and social mobilisation, community based responses and Government structures that were protecting the most vulnerable children.
The emphasis of this programme was preparation of children under six years for school readiness. This process was carried out by a network of community women who supported families in accessing essential services, ensuring school access to older children and providing ECD stimulation activities. These women established lasting nurturing relationships that supported children throughout schooling and beyond.
The purpose of this submission was to present the understanding gained about the nature of the obstacles to quality basic education and how they could be addressed.
Izingane Zethu’s focus was on early childhood development because it believed that period was a very critical beginning for children who were going to spend 12 years of their lives in the formal education system. The investment made during those early years had a direct impact on the child and the entire education system. Experience has taught us that certain elements were critical in interventions that affected the education system and the educating of children and young people.
School education was not about knowledge alone and one system could not achieve sustainable change to the extent envisaged. Education happened in a social context that was characterized by profoundly complex interconnected challenges including poverty, HIV and AIDS, crime and violation of rights of children. Such complex situations demanded holistic integrated interventions that focused on the development of human and social capacity for resilience and change
There was a need therefore for a strategy and reference to experiences of interventions such as Izingane Zethu that provided opportunities for the holistic development of children.
Such strategies had to provide opportunities that enable children to grow into mature, resilient, self confident adults who valued and respected themselves and others. Children and young people had to leave the system with capacity that enabled them to: cope with adversity, take responsibility for the choices they made, and recognise and respond to opportunities that enabled them to achieve their aspirations and quality of life.
Schools were supposed to create and promote a healthy and safe environment for children; Izingane Zethu saw these strategies being implemented by the following: people from all the systems impacting on the schools system, ward and district management, school management team, all educators in school, school governing bodies, and learners.
Izingane Zethu’s proposal for an innovative approach to education for ECD based upon Izingane Zethu’s experience in three districts of KwaZulu-Natal included access – the Government should not assume and rely on the crèche and preschool system for developing school readiness of South Africa’s children. The ECD audit of 2002 revealed that 85 -89% of our children never attended an ECD site. The implications of this were that those children who were most in need for early childhood stimulation were those who did not have access to it. Izingane Zethu urged Government to formalise a holistic approach to the development of school readiness that was located outside of the formal crèche system to develop school readiness to system building for resilience and self esteem.
Izingane Zethu’s experience had demonstrated the success of a model of family/home based early childhood development tested in interventions. This approach had been used effectively to provide access to early childhood development for high risk, profoundly marginalised children including those infected and affected by HIV and AIDS, and those with diverse disabilities.
Izingane Zethu proposed, in teacher development, an extremely holistic process including counselling, and psycho social support strategies for mitigating the impact of HIV and AIDS on children. Izingane Zethu also proposed formal early childhood development education as necessary for a teacher to understand his or her learners. Izingane Zethu had trained, mentored and supported community people as family facilitators who responded to the needs of the whole family when they were working with children. This included food, care protection, caregiver capacity, love and self esteem.
Izingane Zethu also proposed an ongoing informal and formal screening of developmental milestones for all children outside ECD system for early identification of any and all special learning or educational needs including psycho social support, social documents, grants and health screening.
In curriculum content, Izingane Zethu said that its family based early childhood development programme had also informed and confirmed that in grade 1, children who were part of family based ECD performed better than those from a centre based ECD programme. This was due to individual attention that is given to these children. Other contributory factors included improvement of quality of life of their families and intervention that was not only meant to enable them to count, but an intervention that was interested in their total being.
Government was not doing enough to ensure support for children with disabilities in schools especially in rural schools.
Izingane Zethu noted these challenges that impacted on managerial capacity at schools. Members of School Governing Bodies (SGBs) were asked by principals to sign for things they did not know, including blank cheques - so members needed to be capacitated in bookkeeping and policies to avoid exploitation of power by principals. Members of SGBs also needed understanding of roles and responsibilities as well as accountability, which include knowing the importance of handover among committees. Capacity was needed for SGBs to be able to initiate and contribute to carry the vision of the school and be part of integrated school improvement plans. Governance issues needed to be addressed clearly among SGBs so that they would better understand their roles in schools as currently they were merely there as numbers which did not contribute anything in their schools. Their involvement was limited to signing of cheques when necessary. There was limited and in some cases no capacity for schools to deal with children with disabilities in mainstream schools.
Izingane Zethu said that its submission drew its relevance from the need to explore and take advantage of the gains that have been recorded from the Izingane Zethu programme. Sufficient testing of the programme had been conducted and results yielded could be piloted and scaled up for maximum benefit of the marginalised children and the betterment of the early childhood development sector. Further information on the Izingane Zethu programme could be made available.
Discussion
The Chairperson said that one of the reasons why this project was invited to do an oral submission was for the Committee to learn more about the programme of training family facilitators and how it could assist with the difficulty regarding access to preschool education, particularly in rural areas, where centres were not as available as in urban areas. The weakness of the submission was that it did not have much empirical data to support the successes claimed, for example the assertion that children did better if taught the preschool curriculum at home by mothers and caregivers, than when it was done in a preschool setting. She asked Ms Ramatlo to supply the empirical data. She asked what it took to train a family facilitator, how many there were in the two projects, how many families were reached by the projects and how many children were reached as a result. When making submissions to Government it was important to state what the financial implications were and how this proposal would be more cost effective than having a centre based solution. All this information would not necessarily be available now, but had to be supplied in a separate written supplement to the submission.
Mr J Skosana (ANC) said that it was a good programme that the submission had put before the Committee. He said that the NMCF was doing good work, but it had to spread its projects and services to all provinces in order to consolidate development.
The Chairperson told Mr Skosana that he had misunderstood. The presenters were representing the NMCF. She said that Izingane Zethu was a project operating in partnership with the NMCF. She asked Ms Moipone Ramatlo, Director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund (NMCF) and Ms Shadi Xaba, Programme Specialist of the Izingane Zethu Programme, to respond to the questions about the family based preschool.
Ms Xaba said that in one community the project had seven villages and in those villages there were 20 family facilitators. The facilitators received R1 500 as a monthly stipend. Training amounted to about R10 000 per family facilitator, because they were trained as Early Childhood Development (ECD) Teachers. They were reaching 400 families and in the process 1 200 children. The projects were preparing these children to be school-ready. Most were between three and six years of age, but the project also looked after babies, making sure that they were stimulated and that the home environment was nurturing and supportive of their development.
The project also improved the quality of life of the children, which was important, because there was a correlation between quality of life of the family and self esteem of children. To compile the data, she would look at the number of children who had never attended an ECD centre, who received home-based ECD, who were in grade one and compare it with those who had.
There were products of these projects that had completed grade 12 and the data could be supplied. The children remained part of the project as they grew older in the form of youth forums, where they continued their development. The programme was integrated to that extent. The project developed young people to be responsible and able to make appropriate choices.
Ms Ramatlo explained that there were other ways in which this model differed from the centre-based model, for example when they entered the homes they also checked whether the children were registered and had legal documents, if not, assisted with the process, and where needed made sure they accessed child grants. They looked at the care givers, who in many cases were grandmothers, and made sure they accessed pensions. Part of the programme was to ensure that the family had all the legal documents that would enable them to unlock Government services meant for children. The family facilitator had to make sure that the family would be able to support the children by the time the facilitator pulled out. With centre-based ECD there were limits to the numbers of children that could be accommodated. With this model there were fewer restrictions on the number of children that could be reached.
The Chairperson asked how long it took to train a family facilitator. She asked how much time a family facilitator spent with a family in order to impart the knowledge of ECD to a caregiver.
Ms Xaba said that there were different levels in ECD training. One would look at the educational level of the person. The lower the educational qualifications, the more training they received. If someone went to school to the level of grade 7, or standard 5, for year one, it would be level one, or level one and two, depending on how quickly they could master the content. The project had been training people for eight years. Parts of the training were formal and other parts informal, for example workshops around the Children Rights etc. The regularity of visits to individual families by family facilitators was two days per week.
The Chairperson restated her request for the empirical information as well as budgets by way of a written submission. She would need the information if the Committee wanted to submit this model as a possible solution to the ECD challenges in rural areas, to the Department.
Ms Ramatlo explained that the reason that she did not have all the information at hand was that their partner organizations, namely Training Resources and Early Childhood Education (TREE) Little Elephant Training Centre for Early Education (LETCEE) and others, were ECD experts and had the detailed information. She would get it from them and forward it to the Committee.
The Department of Basic Education asked that, when the supplementary information was going to be supplied to the Committee, Ms Ramatlo and Ms Xaba should indicate whether the role of family facilitators could be played by community development workers, so that that link could be made to a position that existed already. She thought the model had great possibilities for job creation and reach.
Another factor was the stipends and the value thereof. There was a tendency to look down on and abuse ECD and Grade R teachers and to underpay them instead of looking at ways to help them to grow and then pay them better. She asked for more information about the stipends that these family facilitators received. This information should form part of the supplementary submission.
The Chairperson said that one of the reasons why this project was invited to do an oral submission was for the Committee to learn more about the programme of training family facilitators and how it could assist with the difficulty regarding access to preschool education, particularly in rural areas, where centres were not as available as in urban areas. The weakness of the submission was that it did not have much empirical data to support the successes claimed, for example the assertion that children did better if taught the preschool curriculum at home by mothers and caregivers, than when it was done in a preschool setting. She asked Ms Ramatlo to supply the empirical data. She asked what it took to train a family facilitator, how many there were in the two projects, how many families were reached by the projects and how many children were reached as a result. When making submissions to Government it was important to state what the financial implications were and how this proposal would be more cost effective than having a centre based solution. All this information would not necessarily be available now, but had to be supplied in a separate written supplement to the submission.
Mr J Skosana (ANC) said that it was a good programme that the submission had put before the Committee. He said that the NMCF was doing good work, but it had to spread its projects and services to all provinces in order to consolidate development.
The Chairperson told Mr Skosana that he had misunderstood. The presenters were representing the NMCF. She said that Izingane Zethu was a project operating in partnership with the NMCF. She asked Ms Moipone Ramatlo, Director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund (NMCF) and Ms Shadi Xaba, Programme Specialist of the Izingane Zethu Programme, to respond to the questions about the family based preschool.
Ms Xaba said that in one community the project had seven villages and in those villages there were 20 family facilitators. The facilitators received R1 500 as a monthly stipend. Training amounted to about R10 000 per family facilitator, because they were trained as Early Childhood Development (ECD) Teachers. They were reaching 400 families and in the process 1 200 children. The projects were preparing these children to be school-ready. Most were between three and six years of age, but the project also looked after babies, making sure that they were stimulated and that the home environment was nurturing and supportive of their development.
The project also improved the quality of life of the children, which was important, because there was a correlation between quality of life of the family and self esteem of children. To compile the data, she would look at the number of children who had never attended an ECD centre, who received home-based ECD, who were in grade one and compare it with those who had.
There were products of these projects that had completed grade 12 and the data could be supplied. The children remained part of the project as they grew older in the form of youth forums, where they continued their development. The programme was integrated to that extent. The project developed young people to be responsible and able to make appropriate choices.
Ms Ramatlo explained that there were other ways in which this model differed from the centre-based model, for example when they entered the homes they also checked whether the children were registered and had legal documents, if not, assisted with the process, and where needed made sure they accessed child grants. They looked at the care givers, who in many cases were grandmothers, and made sure they accessed pensions. Part of the programme was to ensure that the family had all the legal documents that would enable them to unlock Government services meant for children. The family facilitator had to make sure that the family would be able to support the children by the time the facilitator pulled out. With centre-based ECD there were limits to the numbers of children that could be accommodated. With this model there were fewer restrictions on the number of children that could be reached.
The Chairperson asked how long it took to train a family facilitator. She asked how much time a family facilitator spent with a family in order to impart the knowledge of ECD to a caregiver.
Ms Xaba said that there were different levels in ECD training. One would look at the educational level of the person. The lower the educational qualifications, the more training they received. If someone went to school to the level of grade 7, or standard 5, for year one, it would be level one, or level one and two, depending on how quickly they could master the content. The project had been training people for eight years. Parts of the training were formal and other parts informal, for example workshops around the Children Rights etc. The regularity of visits to individual families by family facilitators was two days per week.
The Chairperson restated her request for the empirical information as well as budgets by way of a written submission. She would need the information if the Committee wanted to submit this model as a possible solution to the ECD challenges in rural areas, to the Department.
Ms Ramatlo explained that the reason that she did not have all the information at hand was that their partner organizations, namely Training Resources and Early Childhood Education (TREE) Little Elephant Training Centre for Early Education (LETCEE) and others, were ECD experts and had the detailed information. She would get it from them and forward it to the Committee.
The Department of Basic Education asked that, when the supplementary information was going to be supplied to the Committee, Ms Ramatlo and Ms Xaba should indicate whether the role of family facilitators could be played by community development workers, so that that link could be made to a position that existed already. She thought the model had great possibilities for job creation and reach.
Another factor was the stipends and the value thereof. There was a tendency to look down on and abuse ECD and Grade R teachers and to underpay them instead of looking at ways to help them to grow and then pay them better. She asked for more information about the stipends that these family facilitators received. This information should form part of the supplementary submission.
Lawyers for Human Rights and the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa. Submission on the difficulties faced by refugees, asylum seekers and other foreign migrant children in accessing education
This was a joint submission on the difficulties faced by foreign children in accessing education.
Lawyers for Human Rights was an independent human rights organisation. The Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA) was a registered non-profit organisation (NPO) tasked with promoting and protecting refugee and migrant rights. CoRMSA was comprised of a number of member organisations including legal practitioners, research units, and refugee and migrant communities.
Both Lawyers for Human Rights and CoRMSA had an interest in ensuring that all children have access to basic education in South Africa. This joint submission dealt with the difficulties that foreign children in South Africa encountered in accessing education.
The submission addressed the legal and policy framework with regard to access and admissions. In South Africa, access to education was guaranteed by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights (Chapter 2, Section 29) which stated: “(1) Everyone has the right to a basic education, including adult basic education”. “Everyone” had been explicitly interpreted to include non-citizens. Furthermore the education system was regulated by the South African Schools Act 1996 (No. 84 of 1996) and related regulations. These Acts made access to schooling a basic right and prohibited any kind of discrimination or exclusion, whether on the basis of nationality, documentation status or ability to pay.
This meant that the South African Government was obliged to provide adequate primary schooling for all children. All asylum seeker and refugee children had a right to primary education and were entitled to the same access to schooling as any South African child. Furthermore, primary schooling was compulsory in South Africa.
The submission further addressed the requirement of documents as a prerequisite to school enrolment and registration. The policy stipulated that the following documents were required to register a child at a public school: birth certificate, immunization card, and transfer card or last school report card. The policy made provision for a child to be registered provisionally if these documents were not available and the parent/guardian might be given a reasonable time to produce these documents.
Schools were generally turning learners away if they were unable to produce any of these documents. There was no attempt to assist learners or to provisionally accept them, pending the availability of these documents. Additionally if a school was full, it was obliged to refer learners to the Department of Education at a district level. Schools were not issuing this information to learners or parents and that the usual practice was to merely turn learners away.
The submission further addressed exemptions from fees. Parents or care givers of refugee, asylum seeker and even undocumented children had great difficulty in accessing the forms for fee exemptions. There were cases of unaccompanied foreign children who were under severe pressure to pay school fees despite having no means of financial or other support. There were cases where the schools have handed over cases such as these to debt collectors who had proceeded to aggressively pursue unaccompanied foreign children with the unfortunate result of causing the child to leave the school. The Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa had made recommendations around the issue of foreign children’s rights of access to education in its 2009 report. The report could be found on the Consortium’s website: www.cormsa.org.za.
Lawyers for Human Rights and the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa recommended clarification of the conflict between the South African Schools Act and the Immigration Act to ensure that children were not excluded from their right to basic education as a result of the ambiguous wording in section 39 of the Immigration Act; revision of the Admission Policy for Ordinary Public Schools to reflect the right of children without South African birth certificates to access education; the removal of the reference to the Aliens Control Act from the Admission Policy for Ordinary Public Schools, replacing it with reference to the Immigration Act of 2002; ensuring that all schools were trained to recognise the various forms of refugee and asylum documentation and grant children access on the basis of these documents; finding systematic ways (possibly through subsidies) of addressing the hidden costs of education like school uniforms, transport to schools and these should be extended to cover refugee/migrant children; and enhancing capacity-building and training of all school staff members to address issues of xenophobia and to improve different groups of foreigners’ access to education - there was therefore a need for the Race and Values Directorate within Department to intensify its work.
Lawyers for Human Rights and the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa noted that in specific locations, such as some inner city areas and some border areas, migrants, refugees and asylum seeker children had been accused of increasing overcrowding in schools. In most cases, their numbers were not significant compared with the numbers of South African children moving around the country and needing schooling, and therefore such capacity challenges were actually governmental planning problems rather than actual problems of volume.
There were very few adaptations in the South African education system – e.g. if individual schools offered additional instruction in migrant and refugee languages (e.g. French in some inner city schools), this was done on the independent initiative of those schools rather than as a general policy of the education system. Certain schools in areas with large immigrant and refugee populations did make special provision for refugees and migrants in terms of learner support. The medium of instruction in primary education was the dominant indigenous language in each part of the country, and secondary education might either be in the local language, English or Afrikaans. Research suggested that foreign children did not have more difficulties dealing with the language of instruction in schooling than South African children (often of different linguistic background than to locally dominant language) did. It was thus recommended that learner support for non-citizen children be part of the formal policy of the education system and not be left at the discretion of individual schools.
Lawyers for Human Rights and the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa noted regarding documentation and protection that although there was a well developed legal and policy framework for securing the rights of migrant children in South Africa regardless of their documentation, the framework was poorly implemented and significant abuses of migrant children’s rights continued.
Lawyers for Human Rights and the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa recommended that the Department of Education should issue a directive to all schools to ensure that their admission policies did not require study permits from children who did not enter the country under such a permit (for instance, asylum seeker/refugee children). The Department should work together with the Department of Social Development to facilitate access for permanent and circular migrant children to schools and shelters.
The Department should work closely with other Government departments (e.g. SAPS, Department of Labour) to ensure that the rights of refugee/migrant children were not violated and that they were not denied access to education. This was especially important in cases of child labour when children were supposed to be at school. The Department should intensify its engagement with the Department of Social Development to identify cases needing social work intervention before this had a negative effect on a learner. On the other hand, the Department of Social Development should increase the number of social workers who could assist unaccompanied minors and work closely with humanitarian agencies, including community-based organisations. It should also support the development of in-house training for social workers. Civil society and Government should work to extend services for children to areas near the borders with Lesotho and Mozambique and this included the right to education.
Discussion
The Chairperson said that both the Bill of Rights and the South African schools Act envisaged universal access to school. In practice this ideal was not realized. The wording in Section 21 of the Schools Act was ambiguous. She asked Ms Sicel'mpilo Shange-Buthane, Advocacy Officer, Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa, to give a sense of the extent of the problem. Ms Shange-Buthane said that 24% of children of school going age of asylum seekers were not in school. Were there geographical areas where this was more prevalent? What kind of numbers did this statistic involve? Xenophobia was a nice label for racism. It was appalling that teachers displayed this behaviour towards learners in school. She expressed the hope that the organization had laid charges against teachers it had encountered who made themselves guilty of such behaviour. Teachers should inculcate the values espoused in the Constitution and should be role models in this regard.
Dr Kloppers-Lourens said that Ms Shange-Buthane referred to fee exemptions and no-fee schools and mentioned that some of these learners were forced to go to schools in areas where there were quintile five schools. The principals were forced to enrol these learners, while the parents were unable to pay the school fees. She said that she attended a district meeting in Tshwane South in January 2010, where many of the principals underlined the burden of non-paying learners on their school communities. She asked whether Ms Shange-Buthane had any solution to the problems regarding funding.
Mr Skosana said that no-fee schools should accommodate all learners that could not pay. There should be no discrimination. He said that there were refugees in the country that were registered as such, and there were those that were not registered. In some cases they never applied for documentation. What did the policy say about registering learners at school?
Ms Shange-Buthane proceeded to explain about the ambiguity of Section 29 of the Immigration Act which read that “No Institution is allowed to knowingly give training or instruction to an undocumented person”. This wording did not specify whether it was aimed at primary, secondary or tertiary education. If it included primary and secondary education it contradicted the principle of the universal right to education for children, regardless of their status, a right that was upheld not only in the South African Constitution, but in the international conventions around the right to education.
The Chairperson asked whether schools were raising this issue with the organization. Did they quote the Immigration Act as a reason why they did not accept immigrant and refugee children?
Ms Shange-Buthane said that the organization never came across schools that invoked the Act as a reason for not accepting refugee children, but in their actions they rejected the child, for example, they would give the reason as a lack of documentation.
The Chairperson thought that that was a different issue. The school community did not trust the documentation of refugees to be authentic. The school communities had to be trained to recognize the documentation that people could use when they registered children at school.
Ms Shange-Buthane said that officials at school level would not quote the Act, but as one communicated with officials higher up in the Department, they would quote the Act. CoRMSA had engaged the former Director-General of the national Department of Education, Mr Duncan Hindle, in this regard and asked him to issue a directive to schools instructing them to register migrant children.
The Chairperson asked whether it was forthcoming.
Ms Shange-Buthane replied that every time COoRMSA enquired about it, the Department said that the legal department was still looking into it.
The Chairperson asked Ms Shange-Buthane to forward records of this correspondence to the Committee in order to follow it up.
Ms Shange-Buthane agreed to do that.
She said that the following question dealt with the numbers of refugee children that were not in school. She did not have all the information at hand, but it would be forthcoming. The data was obtained from the Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand. The programme did a national survey at the Refugee Reception Offices and also with various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in the field as well as with refugees and migrants themselves.
She added in this regard that in some areas there has been some positive result to engagement whether with individual school principals or with the DoE at a provincial or district level. She cited Gauteng as an example where there was vigorous engagement and there were districts that were cooperating well with CoRMSA and one of the reasons was that there was a high concentration of refugees and migrants in that area. Communications and cooperation were improving in Durban as well as in pockets of the Western Cape, but there were still major challenges in the border areas, for example, Musina. The areas of prevalence where the problems occurred would then be Johannesburg Central, Durban and the border areas.
The Department of Basic Education asked whether certain problems manifested themselves in particular geographical locations, for example the language problem, did it occur in some pockets of migrant communities, but not in others?
Ms Shange-Buthane said that the language problem did not occur in all migrant communities. The universal problem was access to schools. Getting the child into a school was a major challenge for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.
The Chairperson asked Ms Shange-Buthane to do a breakdown of the problems per geographical area and submit it as a supplement to the submission. This would enable the Department to develop some localised interventions.
Ms Shange-Buthane replied to the issue of xenophobia and whether people, who made themselves guilty of it, were held accountable. There were instances where the cases were reported, but following up on it was challenging, because the refugees would feel unsafe. They would report an incident, but ask the service provider not to follow it up with the educator; for fear that the child would be expelled as a result.
CoRMSA was working with the South African Police Service (SAPS) in the form of the United Nations Protection Working Group (UNPWG) where a system had been created where reports of incidents or threats of xenophobia were reported to the SAPS who would then follow up on it.
The communication and cooperation between CoRMSA and the Department was improving and CoRMSA was in the process of developing strategies on how to address the remaining problems.
The Chairperson asked Ms Shange-Buthane to include in her supplementary report the names of schools and districts and areas from where the complaints of xenophobia emanated.
When migrant parents were asked why they did not send their children to quintile 1-4 schools, they said that the standard of education was too low, and they wanted the best for their children. That notion extended beyond the migrant community into the South African community. People be believed that the former model C schools offered the best education .Until that perception was addressed it would be difficult to persuade people otherwise.
The Chairperson said that both the Bill of Rights and the South African schools Act envisaged universal access to school. In practice this ideal was not realized. The wording in Section 21 of the Schools Act was ambiguous. She asked Ms Sicel'mpilo Shange-Buthane, Advocacy Officer, Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa, to give a sense of the extent of the problem. Ms Shange-Buthane said that 24% of children of school going age of asylum seekers were not in school. Were there geographical areas where this was more prevalent? What kind of numbers did this statistic involve? Xenophobia was a nice label for racism. It was appalling that teachers displayed this behaviour towards learners in school. She expressed the hope that the organization had laid charges against teachers it had encountered who made themselves guilty of such behaviour. Teachers should inculcate the values espoused in the Constitution and should be role models in this regard.
Dr Kloppers-Lourens said that Ms Shange-Buthane referred to fee exemptions and no-fee schools and mentioned that some of these learners were forced to go to schools in areas where there were quintile five schools. The principals were forced to enrol these learners, while the parents were unable to pay the school fees. She said that she attended a district meeting in Tshwane South in January 2010, where many of the principals underlined the burden of non-paying learners on their school communities. She asked whether Ms Shange-Buthane had any solution to the problems regarding funding.
Mr Skosana said that no-fee schools should accommodate all learners that could not pay. There should be no discrimination. He said that there were refugees in the country that were registered as such, and there were those that were not registered. In some cases they never applied for documentation. What did the policy say about registering learners at school?
Ms Shange-Buthane proceeded to explain about the ambiguity of Section 29 of the Immigration Act which read that “No Institution is allowed to knowingly give training or instruction to an undocumented person”. This wording did not specify whether it was aimed at primary, secondary or tertiary education. If it included primary and secondary education it contradicted the principle of the universal right to education for children, regardless of their status, a right that was upheld not only in the South African Constitution, but in the international conventions around the right to education.
The Chairperson asked whether schools were raising this issue with the organization. Did they quote the Immigration Act as a reason why they did not accept immigrant and refugee children?
Ms Shange-Buthane said that the organization never came across schools that invoked the Act as a reason for not accepting refugee children, but in their actions they rejected the child, for example, they would give the reason as a lack of documentation.
The Chairperson thought that that was a different issue. The school community did not trust the documentation of refugees to be authentic. The school communities had to be trained to recognize the documentation that people could use when they registered children at school.
Ms Shange-Buthane said that officials at school level would not quote the Act, but as one communicated with officials higher up in the Department, they would quote the Act. CoRMSA had engaged the former Director-General of the national Department of Education, Mr Duncan Hindle, in this regard and asked him to issue a directive to schools instructing them to register migrant children.
The Chairperson asked whether it was forthcoming.
Ms Shange-Buthane replied that every time COoRMSA enquired about it, the Department said that the legal department was still looking into it.
The Chairperson asked Ms Shange-Buthane to forward records of this correspondence to the Committee in order to follow it up.
Ms Shange-Buthane agreed to do that.
She said that the following question dealt with the numbers of refugee children that were not in school. She did not have all the information at hand, but it would be forthcoming. The data was obtained from the Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand. The programme did a national survey at the Refugee Reception Offices and also with various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in the field as well as with refugees and migrants themselves.
She added in this regard that in some areas there has been some positive result to engagement whether with individual school principals or with the DoE at a provincial or district level. She cited Gauteng as an example where there was vigorous engagement and there were districts that were cooperating well with CoRMSA and one of the reasons was that there was a high concentration of refugees and migrants in that area. Communications and cooperation were improving in Durban as well as in pockets of the Western Cape, but there were still major challenges in the border areas, for example, Musina. The areas of prevalence where the problems occurred would then be Johannesburg Central, Durban and the border areas.
The Department of Basic Education asked whether certain problems manifested themselves in particular geographical locations, for example the language problem, did it occur in some pockets of migrant communities, but not in others?
Ms Shange-Buthane said that the language problem did not occur in all migrant communities. The universal problem was access to schools. Getting the child into a school was a major challenge for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.
The Chairperson asked Ms Shange-Buthane to do a breakdown of the problems per geographical area and submit it as a supplement to the submission. This would enable the Department to develop some localised interventions.
Ms Shange-Buthane replied to the issue of xenophobia and whether people, who made themselves guilty of it, were held accountable. There were instances where the cases were reported, but following up on it was challenging, because the refugees would feel unsafe. They would report an incident, but ask the service provider not to follow it up with the educator; for fear that the child would be expelled as a result.
CoRMSA was working with the South African Police Service (SAPS) in the form of the United Nations Protection Working Group (UNPWG) where a system had been created where reports of incidents or threats of xenophobia were reported to the SAPS who would then follow up on it.
The communication and cooperation between CoRMSA and the Department was improving and CoRMSA was in the process of developing strategies on how to address the remaining problems.
The Chairperson asked Ms Shange-Buthane to include in her supplementary report the names of schools and districts and areas from where the complaints of xenophobia emanated.
When migrant parents were asked why they did not send their children to quintile 1-4 schools, they said that the standard of education was too low, and they wanted the best for their children. That notion extended beyond the migrant community into the South African community. People be believed that the former model C schools offered the best education .Until that perception was addressed it would be difficult to persuade people otherwise.
She suggested that some schools in areas where there were high densities of migrants and refugees be re-categorized as no-fee schools in order to lift the burden on quintile five schools. However, she said, from past experience she knew that many people would then remove their children from that re-categorized school, because it was then considered inferior. She suggested re-categorization, and together with it a massive campaign to convey the message that the school’s standards would not deteriorate.
What emerged from research was that some of the difficulties experienced by refugees and migrant communities were caused by inadequate planning by Government. This was not only caused by refugees and migrants from other countries but by the internal migration of South Africans as they moved from rural to urban areas, and the effects that it would have on schools in these areas, for example, the influx of people from the Eastern Cape into the Western Cape. The planning of the Department had to take these facts into account.
CoRMSA did not consider immigrants legal or illegal. They were documented and undocumented. Refugees were allowed, in terms of South African and international law to enter the country without any documentation, but they were expected to present themselves to the nearest Refugee Reception Office and declare their intention to apply for asylum. Once they applied for asylum, they were issued with a valid asylum seeker permit and once they case had been adjudicated they were either granted refugee status in the country which was valid for two years and renewable, or they were rejected and given an opportunity to make an appeal. If they failed the appeal there were other processes that they could follow of which the last would be to go to the High Court.
With the challenges of Home Affairs it had been difficult for refugees to get documentation within a reasonable time, like within 30 or 60 days. She had to concede that there had been huge improvements in the service received from Home Affairs.
Undocumented migrants were people who did not qualify for refugee status, who came to the country for economic reasons, and who were not covered by the Immigration Act. They were not highly skilled, so they would not qualify for work permits. They had no relatives in South Africa who would let them qualify for a visitor’s visa. Some came from countries which refused to issue travel documents, because they wanted their citizens to remain in the country.
Documented or undocumented, all children had the right and the right to access education. The status, undocumented or not, of parents should not influence what was in the best interest of the child. CoRMSA was in the process of negotiating a permitting system with the Department of Home Affairs (DoHA) for categories of migrants who were not covered in existing legislation. The DoHA was conducting a review of legislation dealing with immigration, to see how it could be adapted in order to close existing gaps and address new and current challenges.
The Chairperson asked what happened in the practical situation when children without any documentation had to be registered at a school.
Ms Shange-Buthane said that it varied from case to case. Some people eventually arranged documentation for themselves through their country’s embassies. Children of undocumented parents who were born in South Africa could get birth certificates although they would be registered as foreigners. In rural areas schools were less strict in terms of documentation, because the South African system of supplying birth certificates was also not working perfectly.
The Chairperson said that the Department had to understand the different categories of migrant communities. Asylum seekers and refugees were categories of migrants for which there were clear laws, protocols and international treaties to which South Africa was a signatory and by which the country and the Department had to abide. For undocumented migrants the framework to define their legal status was in the process of being developed, but in the mean time their children had to be accommodated within the school system. In the case of the former there were mitigating actions that the Department could take in order to realize the principle of universal access to education, especially in those geographical areas that Ms Shange-Buthane was going to point out in her supplementary report.
Ms Shange-Buthane said that CoRMSA’s position was that children’s access to education should not be affected by the status of the parents, whether documented or undocumented.
The Chairperson said that she understood what CoRMSA’s position was. What she meant was that it was easier for the Department to issue directives with regards to refugees and asylum seekers, because the laws governing their situation were clear. With other migrants that did not fall within that category, the laws were vague and there were no clear policies in place. It was harder for the Department to make decisions in the absence of clear laws and policies. Those cases would continue to be handled in the way that they were handled now, until such time that the legislation had been developed and the Department had developed policies implementing said legislation.
The Department of Basic Education agreed with the Chairperson on how to proceed on this matter. She said the Department was looking at the quintile system and how to organize and adjust it in order to make matters more comfortable for the parties concerned.
Educational Support Services Trust (ESST). Submission
ESST addressed the content of the curriculum, and values and equity in education. It contended that the shift introduced by Curriculum 2005 and then carried further by the New Revised Curriculum should not be discouraged but conceptualised and communicated in thorough detail. It was not possible to judge or condemn an approach that the major proportion of the teaching population was not adequately trained to carry out, nor fully understood. The shift in education philosophy was so radical that it took time and needed to be done with strategic forethought, planning and sensitive communication. The shift was a “sea change” – not only a change in culture – the culture of our nation in its diversity, and also the culture of learning in the schools – but also in politics. At its heart it was a shift in the way we understood ourselves – from a people living under a controlling and oppressive dictatorship to a people living in democracy and freedom. Mandela may have completed his long walk to freedom, but South Africa has not yet.
The new curriculum was conceived with the future in mind but limited to how we could overcome our past and how we as a nation could be economically competitive on a global scale. ESST recommended regularly revisiting the curriculum in terms of the rapidly transforming world. In the sixteen years since transformation much had transpired. In the last five years alone the changes had shifted the goalposts and introduced a need for new skills. It had put greater emphasis on the importance of innovation, and shifted our focus in what needed to be learned within each subject discipline. The digital age, the shift in the balance of powers economically, the shift towards a need for governments to coordinate globally with international laws, peacekeeping and policing, given the global scale of legal and illegal trade, required education to change.
There was a need to be strategic in planning that for which the curriculum equipped learners, because their future would be radically different even from the present in which we lived today.
ESST suggested revisiting ancient truths and ancient values that had proven to be eternally relevant. It was important to emphasise the teaching of morals and values in the solving of problems. This would not compromise profit as the Western world feared, but would actually lead to greater profit because values-based problem-solving led to sustainable solutions because they promoted life. ESST would like to see civil society play a greater role in education.
The mission of ESST was to apply its expertise and experience to create optimal educational opportunities for communities, families and children from socioeconomic ally disadvantaged backgrounds. ESST saw its intervention in communities as holistic, responding to needs and driven by community leadership.
The unsatisfactory results of last year’s matriculation examination – a continuum of what had been
happening over the past few years – pointed towards a total rethink of what was going on in and beyond our classrooms. Much had been offered since as to what was wrong with our educational system but very little had been offered in terms of how the situation could practically be turned around. This contribution was based on what had been achieved in some of the most disadvantaged schools in our country.
The classroom was meant to be a place of learning and to create a space for learning. Very little of it could take place if the teacher was the sole disseminator of (mostly boring, poorly constructed) information. Learners could not be dependant on a teacher to learn. What if the teacher, however under- or over qualified, was simply not a good communicator or motivator?
It was noteworthy that literature on the characteristics of a good teacher prioritised the teacher’s personal qualities - being interesting, dynamic, and having a sense of vocation or calling to teach, qualities which elicited enthusiasm and curiosity in learners. Nowhere did one read that a perfect mastery of content or
even ability to disseminate content accurately was what made a good teacher.
Teachers were wary of change, insecure and dispirited from an overburdened workload and the challenges of overcrowding, absenteeism and crime – yet they were implementers of the new curriculum. The vision behind the curriculum and the intentions needed to be clearly articulated so that the teachers bought into it. Moreover their income needed to reflect the value and substance of what they were doing. ESST strongly advised a salary increase for teachers.
If the classroom was supposed to be a place of learning, provision should be made for active learning to take place. In other words, learners should be exposed to resources and activities which excited them and invite them to participate. In this scenario, the material used, rather than the teacher alone, became central to the flavour of the lesson. Innovative, challenging and appealing learning material could make all the difference. It did not exclude the teacher, but it was capable of speaking to the learner despite the teacher.
Learning-centred material challenged and invited learners to actively respond through creative writing, the giving of related examples, the drawing of mind maps, the thinking of analogies, and the application of ideas to a variety of fields of knowledge, the finding of ingenuous ways of understanding and problem-solving.
Some of the difficulties of this transition towards learner-centeredness had been because of the gap the transition left culturally for learners from non-middle class, non-Western cultures. The culture of school presupposed a Western middle-class literate culture in which the learner was exposed to a print rich environment from a very early age. The majority of South African learners did not come from such a background. Therefore in order for a classroom to become learner-centred it needed first to become learning-centred.
Shared learning and discussion implied that learners learnt from one another. Within this context all learners performed well. It might take longer for some, but they did attain their goal in a non-threatening environment.
Because learners, in a learning-centred classroom enjoyed learning, they would spontaneously share “their work” and the learning material with their family; and so home became an extension of school. To arrive at a learning-centred classroom, teachers would have to unlearn what they saw as their primary function - teaching. Their primary function would be to make learning happen, not to teach. Learning-centeredness implied a communicative element in the material to which learners (and teachers) were exposed. To fail was hardly possible within the context of a learning-centred classroom because learners were driven by themselves within a conducive learning environment.
The above suggestions need not replace an existing curriculum, but could be introduced alongside the existing (or some variation of the existing) curriculum. Instead of dividing the whole day into 40 minutes slots, ESST suggested a two hour period where there was more flexibility than the formal curriculum allowed for. These two hours could be used to develop and deepen any aspect of the week’s learning. In this period, learners and teachers developed the habit of thinking further, deeper, and more. Projects that took place outside of the classroom were set, formulated, and discussed. Reports on experiences were written.
ESST recommended that the classroom be defined as a place of learning, not of teaching. Moreover, it was only one of several contexts where learning occurred. Since the focus in a learning-centred classroom was on learning, class size became of secondary importance. The material and methodology ensured that all
learners were engaged in learning. Once learners excelled, they started very early to pursue their own interests, eagerly wanting to know more about a specific field of study. If learners enjoyed what they experienced at school, surely this wood eliminate many of the ill effects which infest the ethos of our schools.
Life skills, including values, were an integral part of a learning-centred classroom because the individual had every opportunity to excel and gain self-confidence and self-worth. The mother tongue tuition premise was still with us. What was apparently forgotten was that a child up to puberty could acquire more than one language (many languages) as long as it happened within a natural learning environment. It was therefore possible that the learner could acquire fluency in English, while at the same time learning through it. Again, this could only happen in a learning-centred classroom, where cooperative learning through English led to spontaneous discourse in English.
Society needed to lift teachers out of the rut they were in and begin to fashion a different picture of who the teacher was. He or she had a calling and should be made aware that this is the case. Salaries should be commensurate with the high trust placed in them. Their training needed to shift its emphasis from (not replace) content and techniques to a sense of what their calling entailed, namely, compassion, enthusiasm, a love of learning and resourcefulness. Teachers need to see the whole of life as a resource for the classroom.
These values could be inculcated from the first day of teacher training.
ESST believed that its proposals were borne out by two programmes that it had conducted in disadvantaged (rural) schools for many years. The English Proficiency Programme/Learning Adventure, a language and thinking skills programme aimed at learners from Grades R to 7, was implemented in primary schools across the country from 1986 to 2001. The ESST Matriculation Support Programme was implemented from 1990 to 2008 and focused particularly on Maths and Science. The programme yielded end-of-year results which showed on average a 40% improvement in candidates’ performance.
Problem solving should be taught in a values-based way so that in considering the solution of any problem the values of justice, peace and compassion or ubuntu were considered as a baseline determinant of whether a solution was tenable. One had seen the impact of children when they were allowed to interact with structures in their society to influence it for good – it improved their well-being, and competence. It gave them a sense of hope and confidence in their ability to make a contribution and in their sense of belonging.
Discussion
The Chairperson said that she understood the submission to say that there was too much emphasis on teaching and not enough on learning, that class size was unimportant and the classroom had to be redefined. She asked what that meant in practice.
Ms Catherine van Schoor, Manager, Educational Support Services Trust (ESST) said that the ESST valued OBE and had the same approach, but advocated a learning-centred as opposed to a learner-centred classroom. A learner-centred classroom presupposed that the learners came from a print-rich environment, that they have been exposed to a culture of learning and reading before they came to school, so that they could take that personal initiative in learning that OBE required from a learner. What learners in the practical situation needed to acquire in the classroom, was the culture of learning. The classroom had to become learning-centred before it could become learner-centred. The learner had to have the value of learning and the cognitive skills put in place by the teacher, through the teacher’s mediation. The teacher played a significant role, but the pressure of teaching was taken off the teacher and placed on the learner and the interaction between the learner and the resource.
The Chairperson asked Ms van Schoor to explain exactly what her proposal was. She understood what Ms van Schoor said was wrong with the system, but she did not understand what ESST proposed to fix it.
Ms Van Schoor said that it was a different approach to teaching that would fix it. It was a way of teaching that would enable teachers to engage learners. The teacher would have to display a love and enthusiasm for learning, which would rub off on the learner. This enthusiasm, together with content would make them want to learn.
ESST was advocating for teachers to be trained differently, so that they could have the value of learning themselves and be learning-centred. ESST also advocated that the method of teaching was such that the teacher led the learner to discover for himself, what he needed to learn, and not tell him what he should learn. The teacher then spent less time teaching the learner, but left the learner to interact with the resource where the active learning would then take place. The learner was taught to ask questions and engage his or her problem solving skills.
The Chairperson asked Ms Van Schoor to explain how the ESST Matriculation Support Programme achieved the 40% average improvement in learners’ end-of-year results for Maths and Science.
Ms Van Schoor said that ESST conducted a programme called the English Proficiency and Learning Adventure Programme. It also conducted the ESST Matriculation Support Programme from 1990 to 2008 and focused particularly on Maths and Science. ESST also conducted the Family Education Programme which ran for five years.
The focus was on developing the material in such a fashion that there was more interaction between the learner and the resource. The teachers also received training and the approach was a group work approach. Learners formed study groups of three or four and they worked through the material themselves. The teacher was there as a mediator. The schools, in which the programme was being run, achieved on average 40% more than schools where the programme did not run.
The use of the resources, which were developed with cognitive skills in mind, and the fact that they worked in groups and were responsible to each other and to themselves for their own learning, were responsible for the success achieved.
The Chairperson asked what ESST was putting on the table as an alternative approach. She wanted Ms van Schoor to demonstrate what happened in those classrooms that did not happen in a typical school. She asked whether learners were accountable to their peers as opposed to the teacher. Were the learners sharing information more or differently than in the usual situation?
Ms Van Schoor said that it had to do with the fact that there was more peer work, that there was greater responsibility placed on the learners; the resources were designed to engage all the intelligences, it was learning-centred and it took the responsibility off the teachers and the teachers were trained and acted as mediators. OBE had adopted many of those values, but there was a gap between the values of OBE and what the teachers have been able to produce. The set of assumptions were different. OBE worked very well in middle class well-resourced schools, but not at all in poor under resourced schools in largely illiterate communities.
The Chairperson said that she was already aware of what Ms Van Schoor was saying about how OBE worked well in schools in rich communities and not at all in schools in poor communities. Ms Van Schoor was invited to make an oral submission to the Committee because the Committee understood her to have said that ESST had a solution that worked. What she needed to understand from the submission, as a policy maker, was why the solution worked and Ms Van Schoor had to explain that.
Ms Van Schoor said that she could elaborate on the recommendations that were made and submit it as a supplement to the existing submission.
The Chairperson agreed that that was the way to proceed.
Mr Skosana referred to page 7 in the middle of the page where it read: “The above suggestions need not replace an existing curriculum, but can be introduced alongside the existing (or some variation of the existing) curriculum.” He asked how this would work. “Instead of dividing the whole day into 40 minute slots, we suggest a two-hour period where there is more flexibility than the formal curriculum allows for. These two hours can be used to develop and deepen any aspect of the week’s learning.”
Mr Skosana said that a classroom was defined as a place where a learner had contact with an educator. The educator had to use the learning support materials that he was supplied with by the Department. He could not understand how this could change. He wanted Ms Van Schoor to explain.
Ms Van Schoor said that the two hour slot would provide a longer period where the learners could engage in groups at a deeper level with a particular subject or complete assignments where they practically carried things out in more depth and detail.
Mr Skosana said at school level in a certain grade there were eight learning areas. There was an expectation that four to five learning areas had to be taught per day. With two-hour long periods, how would that be practically achievable?
The Chairperson said that Ms Van Schoor had to address Mr Skosana’s questions in her written supplement to the existing submission. She said that she and Mr Skosana could not understand exactly what ESST was proposing and how practical it would be.
The Chairperson, on behalf of the Committee, thanked the individuals and organizations that made submissions. She said that the commitment, drive and passion to improve education in South Africa, displayed by the presenters and their organizations, served as an inspiration to the Committee. She expressed the hope that the presenters had been enriched by the experience as well and urged them to submit the additional information she requested. She invited them to watch the website to see the finalized report that would be submitted to the Department. She wished the ones that still had to travel far a safe journey.
The meeting was adjourned.
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Audio
Documents
- Improving Basic Education: South African Institute of distance Education submission
- South African Institute of distance Education submission
- Junior Achievement South Africa Part 1
- Making OBE Work presentation by Parliament of South Africa
- Making OBE Work submission by Marius H Jooste
- Junior Achievement South Africa Part 2
- Izingane Zethu Partnership submission
- Educational Support Services Trust submission
- CORMSA submission
Present
- We don't have attendance info for this committee meeting
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