Schools in Tzaneen in Limpopo continue to struggle to make racial integration a reality. Black and white learners are taught in separate classrooms, use separate toilets, and black parents complain that their children are obliged to learn in Afrikaans at former white schools. During a visit to the town, the Teacher found that practices amounting […]
Millions of rands available for improving the plight of the country’s most disadvantaged schoolgoers remained unspent by the end of last year. At the same time, spending on adult basic education continued to shrivel – and will worsen in the next few years. Spending trends in the national Department of Education (DoE) and the provincial […]
‘Kyle didn’t stand a chance,” says Estelle Kunneke. Her 16-year-old son ran away from Ethokomala, a reform school in Kinross, Mpumalanga, on February 3. He has not been heard from since. More than a tale of one youngster’s mistakes, this is also a story of how he has been failed by all those tasked to […]
I am a teacher at a primary school in Umguza district in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland North province. My school is situated in the rural areas of the district, where most commercial farms were recently acquired by the government under the controversial, fast-tracked land reform programme. The school was built in 1982 after the government resettled people […]
Girls do not yet perform as well as their male counterparts in maths and science, according to a situation assessment and analysis carried out by Unicef in the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal. The report notes that although the gap is slowly closing between boy and girl learners who are taking these subjects, boys still […]
When Domingos Silva left the Angolan army, he returned to his home village and enrolled for classes. At the age of 36, he says, ‘I decided to take the opportunity to learn to read.” Silva was conscripted into the Angolan Armed Forces at the age of 16. He had had little schooling before, and none […]
Martin Mubanga’s parents have changed his school twice this year because he was forced to share ‘overcrowded” classrooms with 14 other learners. ‘What’s the point of sending your child to an expensive school if it’s going to be so crowded?” asks his annoyed mother, Elizabeth. Up to 15 learners in a class might not be […]
Newly qualified teachers, and those coming back into the profession after a break in service, may be compelled to teach in rural or disadvantaged schools, if proposed changes to education laws go through. These proposed amendments to the Employment of Educators Act were released for public comment last month and have drawn criticism from teacher […]
At least 30% of senior management posts in provincial education department head offices are vacant, as are 40% of posts in regional, district and circuit offices. In schools, vacancies are at 20%. The Eastern Cape and the Western Cape are both without a head of department. These alarming staffing figures receive prominence in Minister of […]
The snow and gale-force winds that hit the Eastern Cape last month will adversely affect results at the end of the year, educationists are predicting. When learners returned to school at the end of the July holidays, they found the doors, roofs and win-dows of their schools destroyed by the wind and snow. In rural […]