About 5,2-million children under seven are not catered for in South Africa’s early childhood development (ECD) programmes. Only 1% of the R104-billion education budget is allocated for ECD. Yet a major report released recently shows that investment in ECD pays massive dividends in the health and emotional wellbeing of the children — and in national economic terms.
About halfway through this book, I was still wondering why Natasha Distiller had felt the need to write it when — out of left field, so to speak (actually right field) — there arrived in my inbox a press release that provided at least one possible answer, writes David Macfarlane.
Major slashes to humanities courses at Unisa are in the pipeline, and job losses are sure to result. But, as with Unisa management’s recent and controversial downgrading of some academic posts (see accompanying story), academics say they have scarcely been consulted and remain in the dark about the future of their jobs and the courses they teach.
Bureaucratic sloth or unwillingness to apply the law is slowly strangling a number of schools in Gauteng. Now some are taking legal steps to force the Gauteng education department to do its job.
Following landmark legal action in June concerning school fees, the education department has revealed it is now working out how to compensate schools for fee exemptions. The larger issue of free education was discussed at the ANC policy conference at the end of June.
A senior academic at the University of Fort Hare has been summarily dismissed following a disciplinary inquiry into criticisms levelled against the university’s management in his lectures, in internal correspondence, at an academic conference and to the media.
University of KwaZulu-Natal communications chief Dasarath Chetty is on the receiving end of a brisk communication from his own academic association, censuring him for bringing a defamation suit against a colleague. In a motion adopted at its AGM last week the South African Sociological Association (Sasa) said it ”defends the right to freedom of expression, which includes academic freedom, and urges all members to uphold and defend these freedoms”.
Angry staff at Unisa have accused the university’s management of unilaterally downgrading their posts, with unclear implications both for their current earnings and future pay negotiations. They also say that although they have been given the choice of accepting or rejecting their new status, management has not spelt out what will happen if they reject it.
The South African Human Rights Commission is backing a landmark legal challenge aimed at ensuring that schools apply legislation providing for exemption from the payment of fees. But in opposing the action, Durban’s Hunt Road Secondary School highlights in court papers the acute financial difficulties schools face because the government does not compensate schools for exemptions they do grant.
Photos of a woman cavorting naked in bathwater have landed a university employee in hot water of another kind. Moses Peo, a coordinator in Tshwane University of Technology’s (TUT) operations and logistics department, faces possible dismissal following disciplinary charges the university has laid against him for allegedly circulating the photos via TUT’s email system.