Mpumalanga has begun phasing out farm schools in the province as part of a R125-million programme to provide fully-fledged rural schools for farm workers and village children.

Education MEC Craig Padayachee says government is obliged to dismantle the existing network of privately managed farm schools and tiny 'one teacher' village schools because they are incapable of providing a uniform or in many cases acceptable standard of education.

"Many of these schools are simply not fit to be called institutions of learning. We have already conducted a successful pilot project in the Louisville district, where we established a centralised rural school that replaced all nearby 'one teacher' schools," said Padayachee on Monday.

"The pilot was so successful that we have now begun establishing similar schools elsewhere in the province, and plan to have phased out all existing farm and village schools within three years". The initiative is part of a wider school building programme, that will see Mpumalanga spend R125-million constructing 477 new classrooms, 20 new administrative blocks and 1 000 toilets over the 2004/05 financial year.

"We are also appealing to the private sector to help us build additional science or biology laboratories, and libraries, especially in previously disadvantaged schools, where pupils were denied access to this type of technical learning before," said Padayachee.

"In fact, most township or rural schools were in the past built libraries or laboratories, obviously because the apartheid government never intended black learners to become scientists and engineers".

Mpumalanga's new school building programme seeks, he added, to accelerate an earlier construction project that resulted in 1 614 new schools and 4 888 additional classrooms over the past 10 years.

This track record includes 282 "special classrooms" such as laboratories, as well as 80 administrative blocks, and new bulk electricity connections at 79 schools, with security fencing at 83 crime-hit rural or township schools.

The better facilities, as well as a linked programme to provide more teachers to rural and township schools, has helped to dramatically reduce overcrowding at schools.

"When we took over, 10 years ago, there was an average of one teacher to 82 pupils. I can proudly say today that we have managed to reduce this ratio to 1:35, and hope to reach our target of 1:32 within the next few years," said the MEC.

Teacher ratios have always been problematic in farms schools and are easier, he added, to manage in larger schools such as those planned for rural areas.

Padayachee stressed that a new government-subsidised school bus system would be introduced to help rural or farm children reach their new schools. – BuaNews.