David Macfarlane
Chronic internal conflicts, and destructive and dictatorial management styles, in the national Department of Education could seriously hinder delivery on core features of education provision at school level.
The Ministry of Education has been receiving flak on policy grounds, in particular its ditching of Curriculum 2005 following the recommendations of a ministerially appointed review committee. But allegations made to the Mail & Guardian now put the Department of Education’s management capacities under the spotlight.
Current and former department officials highlight the department’s quality assurance directorate as particularly problematic, but also indicate that difficulties there are not confined to this directorate. And the Department of Education as a whole appears to have seriously inadequate mechanisms for dealing with staff complaints, leading to the loss of valuable talent when continually frustrated officials resign.
Questions are also being asked about the extent to which the education budget is being stretched on paying consultants to perform work that the department itself should be providing.
The quality assurance directorate has a mandate to develop a national framework for quality assurance for the entire school system. Work on this framework began in July 1997, and three years later there is no framework formulated, far less in place.
Quality assurance is a fundamental cornerstone of education provision. Without an adequate quality framework, the government has no way of assessing, consistently and coherently, the quality of teaching and learning in South Africa’s state schools; and so no way of knowing whether it is getting value for money.
Angry current and former directorate officials place the blame squarely on the directorate’s chief director, Dr Nomsa Mgijima, whom they describe as “destructive”, “dictatorial”, “unbearable”, “harassing” and “unprofessional”. The M&G’s repeated attempts over two weeks to elicit comment from Mgijima failed.
Within the past two years, eight officials – including a former director and acting director – have left the directorate. Of these, six left the Department of Education entirely, taking badly needed skills with them. The directorate now has five officials.
“We are currently all looking for jobs elsewhere,” said one official, “and applying on a daily basis.”
“Senior management is aware of allegations … against [Mgijima]. These allegations are investigated. But until verified or dismissed these allegations remain allegations,” said education Director General Thami Mseleku on Tuesday.
Twelve hours later, Mseleku corrected this to read: “As senior management we are not aware of these allegations. However, if anybody would come forward with these or any other allegations, the [department] would be prepared to investigate.”
Yet the M&G has been told that, starting as far back as 1998, staff have complained regularly, through official channels, to senior management. Written and verbal complaints have achieved nothing – except a steady leakage of talent from the department.
“People just resign and leave in droves,” says Zanele Twala, a former acting director in the directorate who now works for an NGO. “The problem is the inability of superiors, from deputy director general upwards, to recognise [Mgijima’s] lack of capacity, and act on it. There are no adequate channels of complaint. It’s a management problem across the department.”
M&G sources also raised departmental appointment procedures as problematic. Mgijima’s previous position was in the Eastern Cape Department of Education, from which she left “less than harmoniously”, the M&G has been told. In addition, her background there in relatively low-level policy implementation was inadequate to the high-level policy vision and direction she was required to produce as the quality assurance directorate’s chief director, says Twala. Another source commented that Mgijima has a record of getting others to draw up substantial research documents to which she then attaches her own name.
Highly trained education professionals in the directorate are “reduced to clerks”, says Twala. As a result, “outside people have on occasion been paid to do the same job as we [education officials] should have been doing”.
Value for money is the issue here. South Africa has the third-highest spending on education in the world (measured as a proportion of gross domestic product), and so faces problems more of delivery than of low investment, says United States Treasury secretary Larry Summers (as reported in Business Day recently).
Minister of Education Kader Asmal comments: “We are definitely not overspending on education. We could still rather be underspending on it. However, because we have a relatively low gross domestic product, it makes the amount spent on education appear extremely large when expressed as a percentage of it.”
At the same time, “we must recognise that the government lacks capacity, trained and lively minds do not always apply for specialist jobs, and we have overestimated the extent to which the government can rely on bureaucracy with its own inherited values”, Asmal said.
Asmal denies that problems of delivery in the Department of Education lead to the appointment of outsiders to do officials’ jobs.
“There is no question of appointing a para-llel layer of leadership,” he said. “The appointment of consultants does not amount to creating a parallel layer of leadership. These people are normally appointed on a short-term basis in order to carry out specific tasks. This therefore constitutes a saving because it relieves us of the burden of having to appoint people, for short-term and specific tasks, as part of our permanent staff with attendant financial implications.”
In addition, “I do not think that we need to see the alleged problems – which we are addressing in the quality assurance directorate – as symptomatic of the entire department,” Asmal said.
This week saw a review, externally conducted, of those departmental projects – including some in the quality assurance directorate – that have benefited from donor funding. The results of this review will be available next week – but only to the department itself and donor organisations, says Ghaleeb Jeppie, the Department of Education’s donor co- ordinator. Mseleku comments: “The review is not expected to reveal anything financially untoward in the quality assurance directorate.”
Twala left the department in 1998. She says that, in her current work for an NGO, “I am making more of a contribution now to education than I was in the national Department of Education. It’s ironic, isn’t it?”
Class Struggle, page 48