Chairperson, this speech is dedicated to every truly professional and committed education practitioner in South Africa. It is to their dedication and excellence that we owe our hope for the future.
In every state of the nation address since his inauguration, President Zuma has emphasised the importance of basic education. In 2011, he spoke of the:
Triple T: Teachers, Textbooks and Time, we reiterate our call that teachers must be at school, in class, on time, teaching for at least seven hours a day.
Every speaker has alluded to that.
Minister, I refer you to the Annual Performance Plan of your department for 2012-13. There are glaring and serious omissions from the plan with respect to all three Ts: teachers, textbooks and time. The omissions do not relate only to the performance plan, but are all too often evident in the implementation of the plan.
My focus is first on teachers. The 2007 McKinsey report, entitled: How the World's Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, states that three things matter most. The first of these is getting the right people to become teachers.
The target set in the performance plan for the attraction of new teachers is entirely inadequate. The Centre for Development and Enterprise has shown that South Africa needs about 25 000 new teachers each year. The department, however, plans the uptake of a total of only 6 800 teachers this financial year - approximately one third of South Africa's needs.
The education sector we know is currently fraught with instability, insecurity, maladministration, union interference and the lack of role models in many cases. Teaching as a profession has declined in attractiveness. I again want to refer to McKinsey, who states with respect to getting the right people to become teachers, that the top performing systems studied internationally recruit their teachers from the top third of each cohort of school-leavers - it is the top 5% in South Korea and the top 10% in Finland.
The primary tool used by our department to attract new teachers is the awarding of bursaries to any interested school-leaver, the Funza Lushaka scheme. There is no screening system in place to determine whether those learners studying to become teachers will ever become good, effective teachers. Why, Minister, can't screening and the attraction of the top cohort of learners be done here? Why are we not learning from international best practice? Why are we not following what is a relatively simple, but very effective way to improve our teaching cohort?
Chairperson, we refer to teaching as a profession, and young teachers, straight out of university, cannot be considered professional teachers. The McKinsey report states, and I quote:
The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.
It lists developing teachers into effective instructors as one of the three most important things, those that matter most.
Why then has the department in its strategic plan not set any target at all for the professional development of teachers? An Education Labour Relations Council declaration in 2009 committed to teachers' participating in 80 hours of professional development per annum. In last year's strategic plan, 60 hours of professional development activity per teacher per annum was targeted. This year, Minister, despite R3 billion being allocated to this in the provinces, the target for professional development for teachers has been dropped completely.
Disturbingly, with respect to professional development, the McKinsey report dismisses the workshop type of development currently employed in South Africa as ineffective. In the best systems internationally, to which we surely aspire, expert teachers are trained in how to coach other teachers, enter classrooms to observe teachers, give feedback, model instruction and share planning. Singapore appoints master teachers to lead the coaching and development of teachers in each of its schools. England employed a similar system and dramatically improved its numeracy and literacy outcomes in just three years.
The South African Council for Educators, Sace, has been tasked with overseeing the professional development of teachers in South Africa. We are told that they will be ready to roll out their programme in January 2013. Certainly, from the details supplied on Tuesday at the portfolio committee meeting, the responsible members of Sace have not read the McKinsey report, and have not studied international best practice. We suggest, Minister, that you encourage them to do so before implementation of the very complex, but most likely ineffective programme they suggest.
Minister, you don't set targets for those aspects of teaching that are obvious, or should be obvious, those that every child should take as a given. Why are there no targets requiring the right numbers of teachers at a schools, and the right teacher for every class? In the Eastern Cape, my home province, no advertisements for Post Level 1 teachers have appeared for more than six years. We understand that there are ghost teachers on the payroll. We understand, too, that the issue of excess teachers must be resolved. However, Minister, political determination must outweigh and outmuscle union pressure in this regard.
Ninety-one per cent of the Eastern Cape budget is being spent on salaries, and yet we cannot appoint teachers, even Funza Lushaka graduates, other than on a temporary basis. And those temporary teachers are struggling to have their contracts renewed and to be paid. The situation is simply untenable.
The Leader of the Opposition recently walked 12 km with the pupils of Zweledinga High School near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape. These children walk this distance to school every day, expecting quality education. Their principal is a committed man; he increased the pass rate at his school from 30% in 2010, to 76% in 2011. He has now lost his science teacher, a temporary contract that has not been renewed. He lamented that he would simply, in his words, become a "yo-yo principal" - up one year, down the next. Should he have to accept this? Should the children who walk 12 km to school every day, braving all weather conditions, have to accept this?
The shortage of maths and science teachers in South Africa has often been bemoaned, most often justifiably so. In the Eastern Cape again, the headlines today state that many learners have not received any maths and science tuition at all this year! A study carried out in 2005, Minister, found that almost 17 000 teachers in the Eastern Cape were qualified to teach mathematics, but only 7 000 teachers were actually teaching the subject in the province. Minister, your department has no system in place to determine whether the right teachers are teaching the subject. This is a serious failing and must be addressed with urgency.
Textbooks have made the front page of every major newspaper over the past few weeks. They make the McKinsey list as one of the three things that matter most. They will ensure that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.
Strangely, Minister, your department's target for learners who have their own textbook for each subject is only 85%. Why is every child not entitled to a textbook? How are 15% of our learners or 1,95 million children supposed to learn effectively without access to a textbook? Of course, in practice, the number of children in South Africa without textbooks is many millions more than that.
The Sunday Times reported this week that, while thousands of Eastern Cape pupils struggled through last year without textbooks, three tons of new books worth millions of rands were dumped at a warehouse for recycling. The situation in the Free State education system has been described as chaotic, with schools in at least three areas not yet having received a single book this year. In KwaZulu-Natal, poor schools without textbooks have to spend thousands on photocopying books for learners.
In Limpopo, the national department has the responsibility of ensuring delivery of textbooks. Legal action has been taken against the department because it has not even ordered textbooks for schools that are not section 21 schools in the province - almost halfway through the school year! More than 90% of the schools in Limpopo are affected. We were astonished, Minister, that you were opposing this action. Opposing action to ensure ordering and delivery of textbooks? Further, you labelled the action a massive waste of time. The judgment was delivered this morning by Judge Jody Kollapen. He found that the Department of Basic Education's failure to provide textbooks was unlawful and violated the Constitution.
I was in Limpopo yesterday. I met with school principals who are struggling along, making copies of pages from publishers' promotional copies of textbooks, but with adequate funding to make copies only for their teachers, and not for their pupils.
Grade 10 pupils in Limpopo should have been well versed in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement, Caps, by now. Their assessment commences on 21 May - less than a week from now.
One of the principals told me that he expected that the standards of the tests in the province would be lowered to allow learners to pass. And he suggested that this would have to be done at the end of the year as well. The suggestion is understandable, but entirely unacceptable. Minister, your catch-up plan will have to be structured and funded to ensue that the opportunities open to the affected learners are not lost through this administrative bungle, and that standards are not lowered to accept mediocrity. We will be monitoring the situation closely.
Chairperson, pertaining to time issues, the last study on teacher absenteeism was carried out in 2009. The average rate of absenteeism was 8%, almost three times the acceptable absenteeism rate, equating to 16 days of teaching lost per educator per year.
There is no target dealing with the control and reduction of absenteeism in the performance plan. The director-general stated that no target could be set, since no baseline exists, and that we cannot set targets without data or any means to measure. As Prof Jonathan Jansen says, the data or means to measure must be found for teachers, textbooks and time - not a pretty picture.
If South Africa is to become truly great, if redress is truly to occur, and if South Africans are truly to be freed from the cycle of poverty, Minister, it is essential that education must become great. Mediocrity is not an option. Your government and your department have that responsibility. You can be assured that the DA will support your efforts. However, we will never accept that our country and our children's future is compromised by what is sadly a seriously faltering system in need of repair. [Applause.]