‘School system a timebomb’

The number of Western Cape schools in crisis and requiring a rescue plan has risen 15 percent from 74 to 85, education MEC Donald Grant revealed on Thursday.

He said the focus should be on teachers who should receive further training so that they kept abreast with the latest developments in their field of expertise.

Teachers should also be appreciated, and paid what they deserve.

Bloch said the 2009 results revealed that serious problems existed throughout the education system right down to “foundation level”.

“There is something horribly wrong with the system and the way the department works,” he said.

“It will take another 12 years to get the results where we want them to be.”

Director of the Schools Development Unit in the School of Education at UCT, Jonathan Clark, said the overall results continued, as predicted, to reflect what he called a “managed” decline.

“Whatever positive spin politicians and provincial educational officials seek to place on the situation, the education system is still plagued by such high levels of under-performance and failure it is not possible yet to see much light at the end of this particular educational tunnel,” Clark said.

Given the poor literacy and numeracy results coming out of national and provincial testing at various levels of primary school, it was “quite remarkable” that matric pupils had managed to do as well as they had, he said.

The legacy of apartheid education, and the immense difficulties faced in seeking to transform an education system which offered almost universal access to poor quality schooling, should be acknowledged, according to Clark.

He said there was a “real crisis of professionalism” in teaching and a problem with weak schools where there was little accountability and even less support.

Clark said that the country needed to acknowledge the depth of the educational crisis.

“The Western Cape is a case in point. If you disaggregate the matric results according to the old apartheid education departments, I would hazard a guess that township schools perform no better than their counterparts in the Eastern Cape.
“We have entire communities of schools trapped in cycles of under achievement and failure,” he said.

Deputy dean of research in Stellenbosch University’s faculty of education, Professor Lesley le Grange, said the problems in the education system were complex.

He said the results gave an indication of “what is really happening in schools”.

“We need to look at the entire system; what we need to do is to return to the basics and to look at literacy and numeracy levels from grade one.”