What kind of radio and TV shows would education bureaucrats design? We’re about to find out. Barbara Ludman reports on a new plan
A GRANDIOSE scheme to revolutionise educational broadcasting is in the final planning stage.
Details are being fine-tuned in a multi- million-rand “partnership arrangement” between the national Department of Education and the SABC.
The scheme calls for guidelines to be devised by “forums of stakeholders” in each sector, for example early childhood education, science and technology, or vocational education.
Education broadcast working groups will follow these guidelines in drawing up plans for programmes. The working groups are envisaged as small committees of education specialists and stakeholder groupings nominated by the Education Department and broadcasters chosen by the SABC. The educationists will outnumber the broadcasters.
Once the committees have translated the forums’ suggestions into radio and television projects, the SABC will put the projects out for tender.
The broadcast working groups will, among other tasks, “ensure that programmes that are produced respond to the needs identified by the sectors [the forums of stakeholders]” and “assist in advising the producers on the key elements that need to be included [or] avoided when addressing a particular topic”.
The presence of educationists will be pervasive under the proposed system. In addition to customary members of production teams, each team will include a fulltime educational adviser. The adviser, presumably an expert in the relevant education sector, will be chosen by the Department of Education but will be responsible to an SABC executive producer and will look after the educational validity of the project. According to the SABC, ultimate responsibility is vested in the broadcast working groups.
A proposal for the partnership, drawn up by the department in consultation with the SABC, envisages a separate budget office to administer partnership funding. Both the department and the SABC will put money into it; the proportions have not been worked out. But the total is not likely to differ much from the estimates set out in the department’s proposal: from now until the end of next year, some R112,416-million, for everything from research, development and evaluation to signal distribution. Production costs will eat up the major chunk: around R50-million for television programmes and close to R25-million for radio.
Procedures and criteria for tendering should be ready in the next few weeks, when the scheme will be launched. Both the department and the SABC say they will abide by the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s recommended minimum input by independent producers: at least 40%.
Initially, however, the partnership intends “re-versioning” existing product: either dubbing local or foreign programmes or mixing clips from one programme into another.
The plan envisages a mix of programme styles. Talk-and-chalk has not been entirely ruled out, but static programmes would take their place in a schedule including documentaries, magazine programmes, talk shows, mini-series, even “soap-type” dramas.
Although the proposal states clearly that “there need to be some basic assumptions about what constitutes good teaching and learning and this should form the basis of evaluation; not whether [the programme] happens to be good television or radio”, an SABC representative said this week that the corporation would maintain “editorial integrity” — and that “good television” would be ensured.
Language policy is still in debate. An interim schedule in the proposal envisages English for most television broadcasts, but radio programmes to be produced in many or all official languages.
The proposal recognises the problems of educational broadcasting in a country where many have no electricity, much less television in the home.
“In the short term .. it is not appropriate to assume that there is receiving or recording equipment (radios, televisions, tape- recorders, video machines, etc) available in schools or in community centres. … Planning for 1996 and 1997 should, in general assume that the educational programmes broadcast … will be accessed by learners and educators on an ad hoc basis.”