The Gauteng Department of Education is finding focus and form under the leadership of recently appointed MEC Ignatius Jacobs.
CALLS from Minister of Education Kader Asmal for schools to become the centres of community life have resulted in an innovation that Gauteng Education MEC Ignatius Jacobs hopes will change the mindset of the majority to their local school. The plan? To employ public relations officers (PROs) to help market the school to the community.
Targeting an initial 180 schools, identified because they are either dysfunctional or empoverished or both, the PROs will be tasked with ”drafting an action plan with the principal” to ”generate enthusiasm for the school”. The kind of actions Jacobs is talking about are cultural and sporting events to be held at the school — as draw cards to persuade parents it’s worth their while getting involved. One strategy due to be employed to develop sporting codes is to offer accredited training in coaching to three teachers from each school. This, says Jacobs, is also one way to ”liberate the raw talent” that he believes exists in many empoverished environs.
The PRO will also have to ensure that the school grounds are well looked after — part of addressing the dismal image of many schools. Jacobs also wants to encourage local skills to be employed in maintaining the school, which will have the additional side effect of generating employment in economically depressed areas.
Fund-raising among the community is another key part of the PROs function in the school. Jacobs believes that ”even in poor communities, with good strategies you can raise a lot of funds”.
The Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) is currently in the process of recruiting these PROs, and anticipate their placement in schools by April this year.
This drive to transform popular perceptions of schools is one arm of Jacobs’s hands-on strategy. Crucially, any intervention made by the GDE must, says Jacobs, ”treat every situation as unique and find different solutions”. Generalised policies hammered out at head office are out, and ”strategies that are spot on to the social context and properly targeted” are what’s in.
As a way of organising resources around areas with drastic failure rates and huge disadvantages, Jacobs has established ”Education Action Zones” (EAZs). Schools targeted are those that achieved poor matric pass rates. Says Jacobs, ”Our biggest focus in these EAZs is just to get the basic tenents of school up and running.” Additional management personnel are bought in temporarily to assist the principal in getting administration systems in place; an intervention programme is carried out for learners, where additional material in ”high-risk subjects” (such as maths and biology) is provided for grades 10 to 12; and the further training of teachers (not only in teaching technique, but also in gaining a deeper understanding of Curriculum 2005) is put on the agenda.
The EAZs are seen more as crisis management, to prevent a downward spiral in poor performing schools, than as a permanent arrangement. But it is a major effort to co-ordinate the workings of ”the district, the school and the classroom, the three critical delivery points in education”, says Jacobs. Efforts are also being made to link up schools in the EAZs with business, with the intention of building work experience into education.
Another new structure is in the process of being set up to make sure the performance of these and other schools continues to improve: the Office for Standards, which will be located in the GDE’s head office in downtown Johannesburg. Besides monitoring the maintenance of standards in successful schools, the office is also tasked with generating better standards in schools that are floundering. Jacobs has high hopes of these interventions bearing fruit soon — and has commited the GDE to meeting a target of a 75% matric pass rate in Gauteng by 2003.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, March 1, 2000.
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