Principals were just as confused as parents and pupils when school started this week. By Pat Sidley and Nombuyiselo Moloyi
GAUTENG’S MEC for education, Mary Metcalfe, may find it tougher than her anti-discrimination rules make it look to iron out all the allegations of racism lodged by parents of children starting school this week.
Her department’s new rules for school admissions take place in a legislative vacuum — with only the racially based laws of the past,in combination with the constitution’s anti-discrimination provisions, to apply to any legal challenges.
New national and provincial education laws are not likely to see the light of day until well into the school year. Metcalfe pointed out to the Weekly Mail & Guardian that Verwoerd’s education plans had taken several years to implement.
Additionally, most schools in the Gauteng area have had only two brief directives to guide them. Principals are relying on the press for most of their information.
The Gauteng Department of Education has told principals to increase their class sizes so that teachers will handle classes of between 32 and 35 children. They have also been told to take children that live in the area. The latter regulation is based on a law referring to white children, but its racist implications have been over-ridden by the constitution.
Contradictions on the financial level abound, with Model C schools (which account for 93 percent of formerly white schools) legally able to charge for schooling and to chase up payments for their debts. At the same time, the Gauteng Department of Education will not allow Model C schools to expel pupils whose parents cannot pay.
Other vagaries in the guidelines (dispensed to the press and not the principals) seem to indicate that parents in ”townships” may have to educate their children closer to home. Officials of at least one Model C school this week appeared to have interpreted the rule this way, telling a black mother to educate her child in Soweto where ”he belonged”.
Metcalfe has suggested that former Department of Education and Training schools (which are fully state-funded) introduce voluntary funds for parents to help the schools acquire extra facilities. Parents this week in several DET schools expressed their resentment at having to pay registration and other fees. The introduction of ”free education” for Grade Ones only has caused, at the least, severe confusion.
There is neither a revised curriculum nor a new syllabus for any subject. Teachers are to be guided by an appeal from Metcalfe NOT to teach anything they know to be factually incorrect.
”We are one of the few countries in the world where teachers will teach something blatantly incorrect because it is in the syllabus,” she said this week, referring to the fact that the existence of former homelands is still included in geography syllabi.
Until the curriculum debate emerges from a deadlock in a committee, pupils will rely on teachers who have been neither retrained nor offered a fresh approach to the new situation. Making matters infinitely worse, the shortage of teachers in Gauteng province will not be eased. There is no provision in the present budget for an increase in teachers and the next budget will squeeze the situation even further.
There are already a couple of legal challenges facing the new Department of Education — and probably several more on their way as the department sets about delivering an education utopia into a rather hellish situation.
Among them is what the constitution really means when it allows a school to set up with a clear religious, cultural or linguistic identity (and who should pay for this) and the possibility of a fight over whether the institution of larger classes breaks the terms and conditions of employment for teachers.
Formerly white Model C schools in the Gauteng area constitute a more powerful lobby than most observers may have anticipated. Fully 40 percent of all school children in Gauteng are white, giving the Model C lobby (where most of these children are enrolled) much force.
Formerly DET schools in black areas are still overcrowded, under-equipped, run-down and understaffed, in many instances.
Model C schools in ”white” areas are facing a better time of it.
Meadowlands’ Tlhokomelo Primary School’s headmaster Jacob Matlawe described his school this week as ”a farm school in an urban area” because of its conditions. The ”jungle” of overgrown weeds and grass outside with the run-down buildings gave the appearance of the school being abandoned, although there were queues of children registering.
Khuthala Primary School in Protea North, which has a good academic reputation, was expecting a high influx of pupils — which was going to swell the numbers of children in each class well above the average of 45.
Rosebank Primary School, situated in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg, faced a last-minute influx of pupils, causing a minor shortage of desks. But that was nothing its headmaster, Les Lambert, wasn’t able to deal with. Although several of the last-minute arrivals, responding to the rule that schools had to accept all children in their area, were black, most were not.
The school is predominantly white but surrounded, in equally plush areas, by other Model C schools with larger numbers of black children.
Yeoville Boys’ School, once an all-white boys’ school and now almost entirely black, had an increased enrolment and was likely to be full, but not overflowing. It was a vision of what is likely to become widespread reality in the delivery of quality education to many more South African children.
The school is much poorer than its northern suburbs counterparts, but offers black children what their parents perceive as a better education than they would otherwise get in a DET school. Headmaster Clive Allman has hired one black teacher, a move he hopes to be able to increase, to help bridge some of the (non-educational) gaps between staff and pupils.
Grade One at Yeoville had its share of children who have recently discovered their right to a neighbourhood school, and this included the lone white child in the class: Hennie Swanepoel, aged six. He and his mother, Monique, are Afrikaans-speaking, from a drought-hit community in the Eastern Cape.
She believes her son should be taught in English and doesn’t ”give a damn” that he is the only white child in the class. ”He was at a black nursery school, and faced no problems,” she said, joined by her happy son telling her what a good day he’d had.