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/ 21 April 2005

Schools take another battering

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 […]

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/ 21 April 2005

Eastern Cape frustrations continue

For five years, says Sadtu, the provincial Department of Education has failed to pay cash bonuses, leave gratuities, salary adjustments, relocation costs, substitute teachers and new appointees. The total amount owed is R100-million. Sadtu’s provincial secretary Mxolisi Dimaza says payments have still not been received and that a request for an urgent meeting with Eastern […]

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/ 21 April 2005

‘Please give us teachers’

Education authorities in the Eastern Cape are once again under fire for failing to deal effectively with problems besetting schooling. With the first term of the year already at an end, around 9 000 learners have had their schooling severely disrupted as the province remains short of as many as 3 000 teachers. Some 30 […]

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/ 21 April 2005

Pedal-power to pass over mountains

Learners who have to walk several kilometres to school in the most rural parts of the former Transkei are to benefit from a pilot project to provide bicycles as a means of transport. The Eastern Cape education department, in conjunction with the provincial Department of Transport, is engaged in a pilot project aimed at supplying […]

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/ 21 April 2005

Absentee educators fingered

A recent head count undertaken by the Eastern Cape education department points to rampant truancy amongst its approximate 74 000 teachers. On any given day in Eastern Cape schools, as many as 17 000 teachers are reported absent. The estimated cost to the department amounts to a loss of R5,3-million daily, adding up to about […]

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/ 21 April 2005

Long-serving teachers get the runaround

A retired school principal with more than four decades of teaching to her credit has received a meagre, one-off pension pay-out of just R15 000. Fourteen years have passed since principal Mildred Adkins’s retirement from Tsolo Primary School and still she awaits her proper pension. Adkins (78), who lives in East London, says it came […]

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/ 21 April 2005

Sentencing of brutal teachers causes uproar

A regional court magistrate in the former Transkei has dispelled claims by the office of the Minister of Education Kader Asmal that his ‘lenient” sentencing of five Qumbu teachers, charged with the assault and crimen injuria on a Little Flower High School learner, was an effort to undermine the girl’s dignity. Convicted by magistrate Ephraim […]

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/ 19 April 2005

Fading away from neglect

“Teaching as a profession in South Africa is fading. It is a worrying factor. Where do we go wrong? Without education no country will survive!” These were the concluding remarks made by Eastern Cape education MEC Nomsa Jajula at a public function in May. But a look at the atrocious conditions and fraught education systems […]