Take the example of Zimbabweans. When they arrive here they simply outperform their South African counterparts on many fronts. This reflects the superior education they receive.
(Vavi. Z. COSATU. 2009)
Can it really be that bad? Can the South African education system not compete with the education system of the failed state that is Zimbabwe? This post is meant to provide a status quo on our public education system. The numbers and research referenced in this post a widely available in the public domain.
The link between education, skills and economic growth (including job creation) is well established. We also know that the country has been hard hit by “skills shortages”. This skills shortage in turn affects the ability of the country to undertake developmental and labour-absorbing projects. High skill jobs and low skill jobs are complementary – you need high skills to manage large projects that then create low-skilled work opportunities. Further the relative shortage of high skills in South Africa widens the wage gap between high and low skilled jobs.
The new ANC led government has realized that despite the fact that previous governments have spent nearly R120 billion on our education system it has not performed at the levels required. The education system as a a whole has major gaps in it. The skills development effort as instructed by the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS) has been a let down. Mainly because there has been poor alignment between what is actually taking place in the real world and what was conceived in the workshops that led to the drafting of the NSDS and the fact that the implementation agencies; the Sectoral Education Training Authorities (SETA’s), in the main have been very weak institutions.
Despite the ±R120 billion that we spend on education the following horrific conditions still remain:
- 7 591 (or 30.9%) schools depend for their water supply on boreholes or rainwater.
- 15 428 (or 61.36%) schools with bucket or pit latrine systems have no sewerage disposal systems in place.
- 4 046 (or 16.9%) schools have no access to electricity.
- 19 940 (or 79.30%) schools have no library facilities.
- 3 387 (or 60.22%) of secondary schools have no laboratory facilities.
- 17 081 (or 67.93%) schools have no computers.
The new government has set about engaging with the failings in the education system in a proactive manner. The education crisis that our country is sitting with is a result of decades of limited investment and exclusionary policies i.e. it is self serving and naive to presume that since 1994 we could easily do away with the results of those exclusionary policies
Where there have been successes, such as in the case of the Dinaledi schools government is keen to build on these. Government is now also more than ready to partner around innovative approaches to improving our education system, some of these approaches include:
- Incentivizing the private sector to see education as a real investment area
- Looking at Public Private Partnerships as a model for investment
- Strengthening School Governing Bodies and School administrations to run better as organizations
- Realigning focus on Early Childhood Development
- Strengthening and making relevant the SETA system
- Looking at how private school quality can be open to more people (there are international case studies that show the economic and social benefits of this)
Of course government is also going to need to focus on the basics. What has been identified as additional areas of focus are:
- The lack of sufficient numbers of qualified teachers is a binding constraint on the ability of the education system to produce quality education. Increased numbers of qualified teachers are needed, including through increased throughputs from training institutions and importation of foreign teachers in critical subject areas with severe shortages such as mathematics, science and IT.
- Teachers in the system need support, praise, training, encouragement, and discipline. An important start would be The Polokwane resolutions correctly put teachers at the heart of education recovery, with a compact that teachers will in return be “in class, on time, teaching.”
- The reality of poor children inheriting the education disadvantage of their parents requires the State to prioritise adequate financial resourcing and teacher training for full implementation of a comprehensive strategy on early childhood development. Poor children need massive readiness programmes to ‘catch up’ with their wealthier peers.
- Government must be coordinated and accountable, from districts to province to national. This requires strong political leadership as well as strong community involvement to raise issues and partner delivery. An important feature of this will be to ensure that decentralization of service delivery management occurs in practice (i.e. school principals are empowered and accountable).
- There needs to be commitment to allocating resources to ensure that all schools have at least the minimum infrastructure we expect for adequate learning, such as electricity and toilets. Poor schools with more potential, such as Dinaliedi schools, could be prioritised for any available resources for libraries, labs, sportsfields, and staffrooms.
I want to end this post with the last paragraph from a report which was commissioned by Government and which informs its new thinking.
Effecting systemic change in the education sector is a vast enterprise, bedeviled by the size of each sub-sector, a long history of gross under-resourcing of large parts of the system, the heavy dependence of further and higher education on primary schooling, and a flaccid bureaucracy. Systemic change in education is a slow, process measured in decades. If the first dozen years of democratic government were preoccupied with equity issues, then in the next period greater attention must be given to improving efficiency. It is clear that the DoE is lining up the network of levers required to gear the system to higher levels of production – from legislation aimed at making schools more accountable for their outputs, and HR policies directed towards professionalizing the civil service; through targeted programmes to improve the teaching and learning of reading, writing and mathematics; to reorganizing key financial, curriculum and institutional arrangements in high schools, colleges and universities. Success will depend on navigating a path between the political courage required to institute greater levels of differentiation and autonomy at the top end of the system, on one hand, and on the other hand, overcoming the natural aversion in the education sector to basing new programmes on research of what has worked elsewhere, piloting these under local conditions, and monitoring their large scale rollout in a deliberate manner.
