THE ROLE OF SOCIAL LEADERSHIP
CHAPTER SIX
THOUGHT LEADER PROFILES
Joe samuels – chief eXecuTive officer of The souTh african QualificaTions auThoriTy (saQa)
we want to build an inclusive country that is non-racial, non-sexist and democratic. a strong education system plays a key role in achieving this. we have managed to expand the education budget extensively, which means we have expanded access significantly, and that has not been a small task. we should be celebrating that. but that does not necessarily mean that the quality of education has kept up. it is quite hard to ensure access as well as quality but it must be done. we need to ensure there is quality across the system and not just in pockets. for this to happen, we need a very clear action plan and this involves an agreed plan for the economy of the country. we cannot just go about haphazardly plugging gaps in the system as they show themselves. if you look at countries like the Asian tigers and China, they have a common, collective, national strategy for their economic future as well as for their education system. we have the national development plan, but it is quite contested. we need a broad plan that we all agree with. we can’t just have one group of people who first focuses on getting early childhood development sorted and another who is focusing on only teacher development. we need to collaborate and everyone needs to buy into the common vision and overall plan. We need consensus across the country and a unity of purpose.
“It is important to have a clear vision for what we want our country to be like.”
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CHAPTER 6 | THE ROLE OF SOCIAL LEADERSHIP
THOUGHT LEADER PROFILES
Godwin khoza – chief eXecuTive officer of The naTional educaTion collaboraTion TrusT
Themba mola – chief operaTions officer of kaGiso TrusT
most south african learners attend under-resourced public schools in townships and rural areas that are plagued by a shortage of well-trained teachers and good infrastructure. as long as stakeholders like kagiso Trust continue to work collaboratively in addressing these issues we can change the face of education. many of these schools experience overcrowding in classrooms, and a lack of access to computers, science laboratories and libraries, all of which is not conducive to quality learning. The department of basic education is tackling part of the problem through the national school build programme to eradicate mud schools and the private sector has made substantial contributions in the form of libraries and computers. however, we need to also recognise the integral role that parents and communities must play in ensuring the safety of the school’s infrastructure. when the community has a sense of ownership they will guard against theft of their children’s resources. There are still major challenges when it comes to teacher content knowledge, quality and frequency of learner assessment, and the avoidance of the gateway subjects like mathematics and science because of a lack of confidence and poor learner outcomes. There has been some improvement as a result of teacher profession development programmes and the annual national assessments need to continue being used to assess which parts of the curriculum need more focus.
EDUCATION HANDBOOK 2014
one of the challenges is infrastructure, but the ability of this nation to deliver infrastructure is something that many people do not understand. To use an example, in spite of there being the money for better school infrastructure in the eastern cape, the ability to deliver on it is limited. i have come across a case where a large construction company failed to deliver infrastructure, because of the province’s difficult terrain, and availability of building supplies. There is also the challenge of teachers being very thin on content knowledge. This has been accumulating since the teacher preparation stage at universities. we are starting to see a lot of cracks there. once teachers are in their posts, the big issue is attitude. professional development is offered to teachers but sometimes we see that they are not willing to do it. The culture around this needs to change. Teachers must appreciate the important role they play in society and they need to do what every professional does and that is developing themselves. part of the solution is collaboration. what we’re punting at the necT is getting key education players together to talk in a non-technical and nonadversarial way. we’ve set up structures in which unions can talk to government, but those structures became technical platforms which turned the discussions to money and labour issues. we need the conversations to go beyond that. we need to genuinely engage on how we are going to plug the gaps in the system. we will not win until all stakeholders are of the same mind in terms of what we all need to do to bring about change. if we are not all pulling in the same direction then we will have an uncoordinated and conflicting reaction to problems that do not take us anywhere.
CELEBRATINg 20 yEARS OF DEmOCRACy
brian ramadiro – depuTy direcTor of The nelson mandela insTiTuTe for educaTion and rural developmenT aT The universiTy of forT hare in the last twenty years there has been a partial ‘de-racialisation’ and almost universal enrolment of poor children in primary education in south africa. of course in the light of our hopes before 1994, these are but modest achievements. a key challenge that remains is the achievement gap between a relatively small group of wellresourced english- and/or afrikaans-speaking middle class schools on the one hand and poorlyresourced urban and rural african-language speaking schools serving the vast majority of our children on the other hand. The education system as a whole - the department of basic education, universities and civil society - need to generate relevant and adequate research and field-tested teacher development strategies as well as wholeschool development programmes that work at scale, in poor and distressed schools and communities. success in the future lies in, among other things, how we tie together four things: 1 2 3 4
pedagogical resources, language, teacher development and support, and parental and broader public mobilisation around education.
we need to ensure that all children have access to high quality education in their primary language(s) and english for at least the first six to eight years of schooling. every teacher who works in large classrooms and with children who have had little or no access to high quality pre-school programmes needs on-going school- and classroom-based development, mentoring and support, in addition to out-of-school training and development. we have to find new and better ways to re-invite parents and the public at large to take an active interest and role in education especially at local level.
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