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The Democratic Alliance (DA) is deeply concerned over the state of the province’s School Governing Bodies (SGBs)

We will therefore table questions in the Provincial Legislature requesting the MEC for Education, Sello Lehare to provide the Portfolio Committee on Education a comprehensive report on the functionalities of all School Governing Bodies (SGBs).

The DA will also urge the MEC to table a detailed continuous capacity building program for SGBs and to design a monitoring tool to monitor the performance of SGBs on a regular basis.

At a meeting of the Education Portfolio Committee and the NW Department of Education this week it was reported that some of the schools in the four district are completely non-functional. This clearly implies that those SGBs are not in a position to support the school management and teachers. The support of the bodies is essential for a favourable teaching and learning environment.

The Democratic Alliance was informed during the meeting that some of the SGBs do not execute their functions properly. This affects their ability to assist with basic maintenance of school facilities such as replacement of broken windows, regular cleaning of school toilets, repairing school fences and other minor issues.

The failure by SGBs to execute their duties properly has contributed to the rapid decay of schools’ infrastructure in the province and we consider their role as central to the delivery of quality education.

SGBs are the only legal authority in the management of schools and are supposed to represent all parents at schools.

The collapse of critical components of school management such as SGBs will compromise the Constitutional rights of learners to learning and the DA will everything we can to prevent this from happening.

Our children deserve better and the time for change is now. It is clear that the ANC government cannot execute their mandate to give children access to quality education in an environment conducive to learning.

Issued by DA