Education after Dakar

2009/01/09

NO FESTIVE season would be complete without the annual orgy of recrimination and congratulation around the national and provincial matric pass rates.

And although the critics repeatedly point out that poor Grade 12 results are only an indicator of a deeper social and educational malady, at least the media attention gets ordinary people thinking about education.

So maybe this is a good time to look at some other important indicators of our education system, particularly the six goals we set with 163 other countries in Dakar nine years ago, when we promised to provide Education For All (EFA).

The first of the EFA goals is to provide early childhood care and education. We’re not so good at this, although we know that children’s early experiences have a profound effect on later learning and wellbeing. So we let 20percent of Eastern Cape children under nine go hungry, and nearly 80percent suffer income poverty. A total of 72 out of 1000 South African children die before they turn five, mostly from diseases of poverty. I don’t even mention the levels of child abuse that scar children for life.

And although policy provides that every child should have a pre-primary year, we need to ask serious questions about quality when Grade R classes are tacked onto unsafe, insanitary and ineffective schools in an attempt to meet numerical targets. We need to question why the “teacher” in charge of Grade R children – arguably the most important of a child’s school career – needs only the equivalent of Grade 12, while a high school teacher must have a degree and a teaching diploma.

The second EFA goal is to provide a universal primary education. Here we’re doing well, and in fact we’ve been improving steadily since about 1950. By 2007 over 93percent of South Africans aged between 18 and 22 had at least a Grade 7, when 15 years ago 84percent of the same age group had a primary education. Our children have more years of education than their parents and grandparents. But we have to ask more hard questions about quality and inequality.

The Grade 6 children of very rich parents, for example, achieve 39percent more in natural sciences and 44percent more in maths than very poor children. And the top fivepercent of our children in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study achieved five times more than the bottom fivepercent. Something’s very wrong.

The third goal is to meet the lifelong learning needs of youth and adults. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (Unesco’s) 2009 report, this idea is so hazy that few governments in the world really know what to do. South Africa has a welter of skills programmes and learnerships designed to improve adult skills. These are governed by the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and funded through 27 Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas). The acronyms and bureaucracy are so confusing that it’s no surprise that the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), designed to combine training with job provision, has only achieved 19percent of its training goals, and spent only 59percent of its three-year budget.

We’re doing comparatively well with the fourth goal, adult literacy. About 87percent of people over 15 in the Eastern Cape are literate, and younger adults have a much higher literacy rate than older adults. But again, there’s a wide gap in quality of literacy between rich and poor.

The fifth goal is gender equity. Our gender disparity, unusually for a developing country, is in favour of girls. In fact, for many years boys have been less likely to get through high school, despite teenage pregnancies and social discrimination against girls. Boys are the needy ones in our society.

But we really fail badly with the sixth goal, that of quality.

The evidence is in our low literacy and numeracy achievements, particularly in poor communities. And our lack of quality education is reflected throughout the system, not only in Grade 12.

Grade R in a failing system

2009/02/13

I FELT proud of the principal of Sinempumelelo Primary School in Beacon Bay for speaking out about the appalling conditions Grade R children suffer at her school (Crammed like sardines in ‘kitchen classroom’, DD, February 4). Let’s hope it’s a sign of growing public intolerance of sub- standard education.

We should share her anger at the way we treat children, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised.

Many schools in the Eastern Cape are not suitable for children of any age, let alone for the five year olds who are increasingly enrolling in Grade R. Such schools are neither safe nor clean. They don’t have enough classrooms, furniture or resources for everyone. The evidence is clear that children don’t learn to read, write, use numbers or learn to think creatively and critically. Nor do they learn firm moral values, or develop a strong work ethic. In fact, research shows that very few South African schools make a positive difference to the 12million pupils who attend them, and some actually do harm.

Knowing this, why do we relentlessly follow government policy that lays down that Grade R classes must be attached to primary schools by 2010? How can such schools be suitable when school principals and teachers often have no background in early childhood development, and expect a Grade R classroom to be a mini version of Grade 1?

Although Grade R practitioners receive specialised, accredited training in early childhood development, they remain the “aunties” of education. The minimum ECD (early childhood development) qualification is only the equivalent of Grade 12, and both salaries and status are much lower than those of real teachers. Practitioners who improve their qualifications immediately try for “promotion” to the Foundation Phase.

And why do we insist that every child should have a year at pre-school by 2010, even when it means penning them up in a small shack with nothing to do? Sinempumelelo is certainly not the only school that offers a poor environment. One GradeR class we know of was relegated to a sheep shed after the specially-built Grade R classroom was commandeered as a staff-room. Five-year-old children play in storerooms, amongst rubbish, dust and rolls of barbed wire. Many children are still taught by rote and threatened with a stick if they make a mistake.

It’s not that the policy is bad. On the contrary, in 2001 the Education White Paper 5 on early childhood development broke new ground in acknowledging the profound importance of the early childhood years for the development of human potential. It argues convincingly that society benefits enormously if young children are healthy, well nourished, and are offered creative opportunities and safe surroundings to learn about each other and the world. Therefore, so White Paper 5 argues, government should invest money, time and energy in the wellbeing of all young children, particularly the poor.

One of its main thrusts was to set out a plan – substantiated by international and national research – that every child should be provided with a good quality pre-primary year by 2010. Nothing wrong with that, except that we’ve tacked it onto an already dysfunctional system.

It must have seemed a wonderful idea, in the heady excitement of new and progressive policy development, to airily propose using the existing school system “with some additional investment in building rehabilitation” to accommodate the requirements of Grade R.

Seven years later, the Eastern Cape Department of Education annual performance plan admits that it is so “handicapped by budgetary constraints” that Grade R classes have been attached to schools without the necessary resources or training of practitioners, and that the physical infrastructure is ill-equipped and classrooms in short supply.

It’s time to get our priorities right. Too strong a focus on Grade R at schools not only detracts from the responsibility of communities and families to nurture and educate young children, but also exposes young children too often to what we can only call abuse.