South Africans should demand greater accountability from teachers and their unions to arrest the chronic underperformance in many schools.
In a frank interview about her four years in office Education Minister Naledi Pandor told the Teacher that her biggest worry was the “underperformance of schools and the fact that we have not yet succeeded in entrenching quality throughout the system”.
But, said Pandor, the education system did not need “something spectacular” to address these problems, but simply required everyone in the system to do what they are supposed to do.
“This means (as a teacher) you go to school, you stay at school the whole day, you are prepared and there are certain routine things that happen in schools: you do the class register, you have assembly, you go to class, there is a proper timetable, there is testing, there are textbooks, you use the textbooks.
“I really tried to create a system that would work normally. The working part is going to take longer, but the building blocks are there – that I feel I have achieved,” she said.
Pandor said part of the problem is that the department relies on teachers’ unions as the contact point with teachers. Unions, she said, are not neccessarily professional and are not playing their part in transforming education.
“I think we need courage in the country to confront teachers’ unions – the courage to say if you are a progressive union you will do the right thing. I think we in the ANC need to have the courage to speak out (against unions) when things are not right. Sometimes you are bedevilled by wanting political support so you don’t always say what you should,” she said.
Pandor’s consistent focus in the past four years has been to improve the quality of education by redirecting attention to basics skills.
“All of us have to be far more attentive to core skills that are associated with education – to read, write, use multiple text, think, how to use knowledge.”
However, she said she believed she has created a basis upon which the next minister will be able to progress.
“They don’t have to start again. I hope they don’t have to talk again about the importance of reading and writing, numeracy – they can just make it happen.”
Even in terms of the outcomes-based education curriculum Pandor has taken a pragmatic approach, saying that it became an ideology instead of an approach.
In her quest to understand why people don’t like it she told her officials “it must be something you do in the workshops”. So she asked them to do a workshop for her.
“I could not understand what they were talking about. They were talking about the process you have to utilise, the process of learning and you begin with first principles and you integrate…,” Pandor said.
Believing that teachers have to be shown rather than told what to do, Pandor said the department is now looking at better ways to train people.
Although Pandor said her “biggest celebration” is that South Africa finally has one national curriculum, the problems around the late release of last year’s results of the national senior certificate still infuriated her.
She said this could be blamed on the new computer system, but also poor administration, some officials who did not do their jobs and certain school principals, who did not do what they were supposed to do in the school-based assessment for the exam.
“In Mpumalanga the computer centre where the results are captured is in Nelspruit. The scripts are in Middelburg. So everytime you don’t have marks for somebody officials have to drive to Middelburg. It was unbelieveable. All you have to do is to create a storage space in Nelspruit until you have finalised the results. It takes the minister three weeks to discover that. I have never been so upset – even now my heart pounds if I talk about it,” she said.
Pandor said her achievements included the Foundations for Learning campaign to promote reading, writing and maths in primary school; the Drop All and Read campaign to get books in schools; the multibillion-rand Kha Ri Gude adult literacy campaign; the reintroducation of bursaries for teachers through the Funza Lushaka scheme; the work to establish an inspectorate; and the R1.9-billion recapitalisation of further education and training technical colleges.
At the time of the interview Pandor’s future was uncertain. Although she was number 10 on the ANC’s national election list and could remain a Cabinet minister after the election, “as a discplined member who doesn’t think its proper to promote myself”, she refused to be drawn on whether she wanted to return to the education portfolio.
“I gave it my best shot (as the minister of education), but I underestimated the way we still had to go. I now recognise it is a much longer haul than many of us thought.”