Primarashni Gower

Music blares from the house as people walk past the corrugated-iron sliding gate, trying to sidestep a used condom lying on the pavement.

South Africa’s poorest learners can definitely look forward to one major school reform under a Jacob Zuma-led government -— smaller class sizes.

The "easy" questions in the 2008 national senior certificate maths exam could have been easier; while the difficult questions could have been more difficult. Had this occurred, fewer learners would have achieved "A" symbol passes.

South Africans should demand greater accountability from teachers and their unions to arrest the chronic underperformance in many schools.

FUSSY FREYA by Katharine Quarmby and Piet Grober (illustrator)

The difficulty of rating education policies – and the work of ministers of education for that matter – is that their true successes and failures emerge only over time. By their very nature public education systems are unwieldy thereby disallowing quick fixes.

More than 1 000 schools country-wide are taking part in a programme to cut the epidemic of violence and crime among school learners. Hlayiseka is a R3,5-million project run by the education department in conjunction with the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention.

The days of learners receiving their lessons in tumble-down mud schools are nearing an end, with the allocation of R2,7-billion by the national treasury to provinces to eradicate such schools.

Teacher union officials are pulling members from after-hours gatherings called by the Gauteng department of education in a campaign to stop meetings being called at the last minute.