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Date : 02/10/2006
Source: Department of Education
Title: Pandor: District colloquium


Address by the Minister of Education, Ms Naledi Pandor, MP, at the District colloquium, Johannesburg

“Districts: professional centres of school support”

Programme Director: Mr Petje,
Heads of Education
District based officials

President Mbeki related an interesting yet troubling story at a recent Imbizo meeting in the Eastern Cape. He referred to a letter he was handed by a person attending the Imbizo. The letter concerned a ten-year campaign that the individual had waged in an effort to get political action on a dangerous road near a school. Over the ten years of the man's fight for attention, several children a month were killed on that road. Finally the man got his letter to the president, a letter he had sent to every sphere of government, to MPs and MPLs. The matter was handed to the premier of the province, simple road humps were built, and children's lives are safer.

The story illustrates a worrying tendency of unresponsiveness to challenges faced by the people, a poor appreciation that we are in office to serve and that a response to development would not take ten years if we acted with vigour. Good Morning. Thank you for being here. I began with that story because to some degree it characterises some of the challenges that bring us here today, challenges of inertia, an unwillingness to respond, neglect of our communities, especially the most marginalised, and an avoidance of quick action if the issue is not part our immediate strategic plan.

Gathered in this room today are the spheres of education governance, national, provincial, and district. Our constitution refers to spheres; it mandates them to act co-operatively but also assigns three important attributes that define their role and hopefully their functions. They are distinct, interdependent, and interrelated. The constitution goes even further in that it sets out the character of each sphere in great detail and provides guidelines on how the spheres should execute their specific powers and mandates.

Many constitutional experts have commented on the smooth manner in which the three spheres have operated over the past 10 years. There has been little use of the constitutional power of intervention, one province, briefly, a few municipalities and the recent support programme at Home Affairs as a national example.

This is an impressive record for a young constitutional democracy and it confirms that we do have that legal basis for complex collaborative arrangements and that these can be used for strengthening development.

This meeting is not a constitutional conference, but the workings of governance structures in South Africa are important examples on which we as a sector should base some of our review and planning.

Co-operation and collaboration should be utilised more effectively to secure action on our mandate of delivering quality education for all the children in our country.

The following detailed examples of our challenges present four stark illustrations of the reasons for our meeting.

This meeting is intended to inform and agitate. For some of you it will seem irrelevant, because the challenges do not appear in your district. I remind you though, that we are interrelated, so you need to collaborate with others to help them.

Illustration one is an extract from Prof. James Moulder's Facing the Educational Crisis, a book published in 1992. He writes as follows on literacy and numeracy:

“Primary schooling is the high road to literacy and numeracy and to the elimination of the shameful fact that half of South Africa's adults cannot do a job that requires one to read, write or count. We cannot have democratic institutions. And we cannot redistribute power in any significant way.”

Illustration two was referred to in my 2005 matric results announcement speech.

I indicated then that that we have 79 districts in our country, 6 perform very well, 60 are average performers that can do much better, and 13 are doing little to serve education in South Africa and should be under firm provincial supervision.

The top six districts are known to you all: Breede River/Overberg, Northern Metropole, South Cape/Karoo, West Coast/Winelands (Western Cape); Namakwa, and Siyanda (Northern Cape). There are apparently also four districts in Gauteng and two in the Free State that are top performers.

Performing well has been taken to mean a matric pass rate of 80% and above. It is important to stress that even in the best performing districts there are failing schools and more needs to be done by the leadership to determine ways of assisting such schools.

The reference above to provincial supervision or administration is a policy matter we may need to attend to seriously. Many systems in the world have the policy of placing failing schools under the curator ship of a support team to work with the school and governing body to lift the school/s out of mediocrity to excellence.

Illustration three speaks to the lack of clarity over the roles, responsibilities and functions of districts.

The district system in our sector does not work maximally because it has somewhat of an arbitrary character in the organizational structure of education.

Districts are a vital and necessary part of our system but they have to be appropriately supported by legislation and other mechanisms. At the moment there is a great deal of diversity in structure form and ability.

We must address this if districts are to be the quality professional support offices that our education system urgently needs.

Districts must be assigned proper powers, budgets that they manage with clearly set obligations, and a core of professional staff to ensure they provide professional support effectively.

To play such a role, districts must be staffed by persons who understand and know education policy, and understand what it takes to make education work. District officials should know our curriculum and its core objects and principles; they should be experts on assessment, on teacher development needs and on school resource planning and allocation.

In a nutshell, districts should have the ability to support quality teaching and learning in our schools.

I close with illustration four, which is based on a range of experiences I have had in the past two years.

Teachers tell me they are often not supported when they require curriculum advice or are given advice that does not support good teaching. Some teachers complain of poor service in our district offices.

Further anecdotes relate to more than five different research studies and three international tests that place South Africa at the bottom in academic learning. Our children read, write, and count badly.

Many of our districts have not devised strategies or plans to overcome these poor ratings.

In fact, I suspect district and regional offices do not know the learning status of their schools. They focus on matric like us and not on learning from grade R to 12.

I hope that this meeting will begin the process of our getting learning right by supporting districts to become structures with clear roles and functions adequately resourced and professionally capable of executing our mandate of quality learning for all the children of our country.

Issued by: Department of Education
2 October 2006

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