Independent Newspapers
KwaZulu-Natal Education MEC Senzo Mchunu speaks at the launch of his 2014 school admissions campaign in Umlazi. Picture: NQOBILE MBONAMBI
Durban – Lazy and uncaring teachers, principals and education department officials were undermining carefully considered government policy to give all children a quality education and they should be fired, KwaZulu-Natal Education MEC Senzo Mchunu said yesterday.
He took this hard line while speaking at the launch of his 2014 school admissions campaign in Umlazi.
He urged parents who still hadn’t got the message to apply to schools timeously to secure places for their children, and warned them not to assume their children had been granted admission in the absence of a response from the school.
And, while parents scrambled to try to secure places at former Model C schools, they could not accommodate everybody, Mchunu warned. He then went on to bemoan the ineptitude of management teams at certain schools and questioned how they had been appointed in the first place.
He told of how at one school, Grade 10 maths pupils were without books for five months, while they collected dust in a school office.
At another, Grade 11 accounting pupils who had learnt maths literacy up until August, wrote a core maths exam at the end of the year, before again being taught maths literacy in the first half of Grade 12.
“When people attack the government, saying we in government and the ruling party are failing to run education, what they mean is not that the ANC or the government has failed to make policies – it has not. What, perhaps, we have failed to do is to come across people who run schools (badly), and remove them on the spot.”
Mchunu said that if he had his way he would fire education staff who gave children a raw deal.
He was even more incensed that the department officials tasked with overseeing clusters of schools (circuit managers and district directors) claimed to be unaware of botch-ups.
Mchunu also took the opportunity to allay fears about school closures in the province.
At this stage, communities were to be engaged, he said, explaining that sometimes it was in the best interest of quality education, citing the example of a school in the Underberg area, which had four pupils, all in different grades, and one teacher.
leanne.jansen@inl.co.za
The Mercury
