INLSA
Durban hosted the SA Basic Education Conference last week and from all accounts, it was an instructive and constructive forum that revealed grave concerns about education in the country.
I would have liked to have attended, but I had other commitments.
However, I did attend a National Business Initiative (NBI) meeting. The topic under discussion was the collective influence of business on schooling.
The NBI started looking into this a few years ago, when questions were being raised by its member companies about the real and sustainable value of their contributions to basic education.
Readers may be surprised to learn that the total amount of business-sector funding to schools each year exceeds R1 billion. There could be other unknown amounts too.
The NBI ran a project in several provinces recently, including in KwaZulu-Natal, known as Equip (Education Quality Improvement Partnerships). A pertinent question to ask is why the expenditure of so much money has resulted in so little progress. This is exactly what corporates were asking. Was their money being spent in the wrong way, with the wrong people and on the wrong things?
Insofar as companies were inclined to choose the projects they wished to support, often without clear insights into what the possibilities were, collective attention was not given to any particular project or sphere where success could be claimed as a result of a concerted volume of input.
Some gave computers, some built classrooms, some established libraries or gave books.
Others gave bursaries and so on. Although all these are needed, the effect of so many different things was not as great as could be achieved by establishing a list of priority needs that more donors could subscribe to.
This was the task undertaken by the NBI: examine what projects are being supported, engage all parties concerned and listen carefully to what the needs are. And, ultimately, identify where the ‘‘business buck’’ will reap the greatest yield.
The challenges facing school education are complex and have such a large influence on the welfare of our country, that it is difficult to know where to begin.
One of the biggest challenges is trying to locate the clichéd ‘‘low hanging fruit’’ because there are no quick wins when it is impossible to measure effectiveness in the short term.
For example, no matter how much teaching in Grade 12 may be improved by an intense in-service training programme for teachers, it would be unlikely to bring the matric pass rate to an acceptable level (70 percent is far from acceptable, in my view).
Children who were disadvantaged, or even deprived of decent education when they first enrolled at school, are likely to remain similarly prejudiced throughout their school lives – and even beyond.
More than in any other area, redress takes time in education. It is not just a matter of extra lessons.
During the meeting, in the conversation that ensued after the formal presentations, people spoke encouragingly about the NBI’s engagement with the Department of Basic Education.
There is strong and increasing support for partnerships and a growing realisation that although the provision of education is a government responsibility, it will improve only when civil society and parents recognise that they, too, have a critical role to play.
Engagement with the national department has limited value because the interfaces that characterise teaching and learning occur in schools.
In my experience, the reality is that whatever the partnership arrangements made with the national department, they are inevitably diluted when cascaded to provincial departments, and then further diluted by the time they reach the schools and pupils.
I often wonder what informed the structure of management in education. Why does local government have no role to play in a sphere so intimately related to communities and their welfare?
If there is rationality in the present model, why is the sphere so tainted by the remoteness of those in charge and a hierarchical ambience that reinforces the ‘‘ivory tower’’ image of education departments?
