Business responded to Nelson Mandela’s call to help build schools in the Eastern Cape, but what has become of these noble efforts? Janette Bennett reports
When Nelson Mandela asks for help to build schools in South Africa’s poorest province, few mortals can refuse. Irresistibly, Mandela attracted funding for rural schools in the former Transkei homeland, where he was born and spends much of his post-presidency time.
Now part of the Eastern Cape, the Transkei emerged from apartheid with a backlog of 21 000 classrooms and little hope of meeting it. About 40% of the province’s 6 000 schools were in urgent need of renovation.
Approached by communities for schools, Madiba turned on his magic.
Business’s answer was about R65-million for building and equipping schools. The European Union (EU) put in more than R100-million. The Japanese government spent R100-million and plans to spend R50-million more through the Nelson Mandela Foundation, set up two years ago to formalise Mandela’s work in democracy, education and health.
The response was so generous and the activity so enthusiastic that it was unclear how many “Madiba schools”, as they are known, existed.
An Eastern Cape Department of Education base-line survey, an audit carried out by Fort Hare’s Institute of Governance, has identified 35 schools funded by business. Japan has funded 45; by 2002, it would have funded 20 more. The EU has funded 50. This is far more than a dent on backlogs. But, sadly, the wheels almost came off. The most important yardstick is the matric pass rate. Last year the Madiba schools achieved a 40% pass rate, way below the national 57,9% and provincial 49,8%. At the 35 business-funded schools, 1 557 candidates failed, 834 passed and another 205 gained exemptions.
A task team has been formed to bash out a co-ordinated plan for donor-funded schools. Working together, the department, foundation, donors and communities aim to turn the schools into centres of excellence for “clusters” of schools, and resources for communities.
Task team head, the department’s physical planning director Eldred Fray, sees a public-private partnership developing, with the department on board at the start of projects, not the end. “We will use the survey results to put together a business plan to cover the areas that need support to improve the quality of learning in the classroom,” he says. On the surface, the schools appear healthy. Teachers are relatively well educated: 270 (45%) have a degree and professional training, 215 have professional training only, and 69 have a degree only. Six have not matriculated and 46 have less than three years’ professional training.
Learner:educator ratios (33:1) are reasonable (one junior secondary school has 103 learners per teacher), and 93% of teachers expect learners to work hard. Task team member, the foundation’s Bridgette Prince, has noted a great deal of commitment by principals to make the schools work. “As much as we are concerned, the principals are concerned.”
The problems, she says, “have everything to do with the low levels of just about everything in the province”.
The devil is in the detail: commentators say despite teachers’ qualifications, many lack experience. And, they say, the ratios obscure the fact that some schools are under-utilised.
The survey shows just 30% of teachers use available laboratory facilities, 41% understand outcomes-based education (OBE), and 39% believe they have the ability to implement OBE.
Teachers complain of poor support from district education offices. Less than a third are satisfied with supplies, including textbooks.
Donors are concerned. Vodacom, for instance, built and equipped the Cangci Comprehensive High School near Bizana, adding a health clinic nearby. It was so worried about Cangci’s 40% matric pass rate that it employed consultants to find out why. They highlighted many problems, “the main one being the shortage of teachers, and the low level of the existing teachers”, Vodacom corporate affairs executive Joan Joffe says.
When extra teachers did not arrive through redeployment in June, as agreed to by the department, Vodacom employed Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training (ORT) to provide teachers to spend the rest of the year at Cangci and also to train existing teachers. Eastern Cape MEC for Education Stone Sizani is frank, not hesitating to criticise his department’s administration. He blames lack of communication, shortage of experienced teachers in rural areas, “pure lack of resources”, department inefficiencies and bureaucracy, and lack of capacity.
During apartheid, three out of six education departments in the region supplied school buildings, he points out. Communities had to build the rest. “In any normal society, planners would use the birth-rate to determine how many learners it would have to provide for in terms of classrooms, books and teachers. There was no such record in 1994,” Sizani says.
The first Madiba school was completed in 1995. On the one hand, the department was not part of planning, although it would have to staff the schools; on the other, it was plagued by disorganisation and bureaucracy. “The department was not able to respond to the needs of the schools,” Sizani says.
Efforts to redeploy teachers from some over-staffed urban schools halted when a court called it forced removals of the worst type. Redeployment, meanwhile, prevented outside teachers being brought into the province. “Now the redeployment programme is over, we can look at addressing this problem,” Sizani says.
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, October 2001.