Confusion reigns as an independent school forced to close goes to court ACTION by the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) to crack down on ”fly-by-night” independent schools operating illegally may open the GDE up to legal action. A Pretoria-based independent school, Way to Success Academy, late last month took the GDE to court for having […]
School governing bodies’ election year brings up fresh debate IT’S election year again, as the three years of service for those on school governing bodies (SGBs) comes to an end, and new representatives have to be voted in. Posters encouraging parents to become more involved in their children’s schools were in evidence at a conference […]
One woman could no longer stand by and watch the children suffering. Julia Grey went to see what her efforts produced It all started because Theresa Mkhwanazi couldn’t carry on just witnessing the daily abuse that children face in the miserable squalor of Cato Manor, an informal settlement packed on the hillslopes of Durban. Mkhwanazi […]
Educators due to teach in the new reception-year classes have been promised a pittance by the department. Julia Grey reports Picture this: an educator at a public primary school gets down to the business of teaching grade ones, while in the classroom next door, the grade R teacher guides the five- and six-year-olds through their […]
The past is far from over as an online database revisits South Africa’s past. Julia Grey reports History’s a funny business: the politics of capturing the past can lead to so many interpretations of one event that you would be forgiven for wondering if any of it really happened at all. Omar Badsha, director of […]
Julia Grey found uncertainty on the ground about what it means to be a dedicated maths and science school Letsibogo Girls Secondary school in Meadowlands, Soweto, is one of the 102 schools identified nationally to specialise in maths, science and technology education. In many ways, the school is an obvious candidate for the role, according […]
The long-awaited policy on early childhood development (ECD) is not all it was hoped to be. Julia Grey reports Critics of the ECD white paper, released in May, believe weaknesses in the government’s plan ”takes provisioning backwards rather than forwards”. So says Salim Vally from the Education Policy Unit at Wits University, who identifies ”children […]
Catering for school-going criminals is one of the many challenges facing special-needs education, writes Julia Grey Running a school where the only admission requirements are that learners are convicted criminals and of school-going age has it’s own special demands. Ethokomala in Mpumalanga is one of only two reform schools in the country that caters for […]
The most vulnerable in society are set to benefit from new plans to include disabled learners in mainstream education, writes Julia Grey The principle of inclusion has long been promoted by the Department of Education as the fairest approach to special-needs learners, who’ve been marginalised for decades in separate schools. But sceptics have warned of […]
Several schools in Gauteng have fallen prey to a computer company whose promises have left them offline and in debt, writes Julia Grey Debt amounting to millions has been added to the burdens of at least four Gauteng schools which found out too late that their trust in a computer firm was misplaced. On the […]