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Date
: 21/09/2004
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: N Pandor: Ikhwezi Festival
ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, N PANDOR, MP, AT THE IKHWEZI
FESTIVAL, Mount Ayliff, 21 September 2004
Premier of the Eastern Cape, Ms Nosima Balindlela
MEC for Education, Mr Mkhangeli Matomela
Mayor of Mt Ayliff
Swiss Ambassador HE Mr Victor Christen
"IKHWEZI - A PROJECT OF HOPE AND INSPIRATION"
I am delighted to join you this morning to take part in your
festival. I believe the relationship between the provincial
department and Ikhwezi and more widely between the Ikhwezi and the
government as a whole has the potential to improve the quality of
your lives in a very wide variety of ways.
Let me say a few words of congratulations to the stakeholders in
this remarkable project. Ikhwezi is an initiative conceived of and
implemented by the Eastern Cape Department of Education and the
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. In partnership with
the Media in Education Trust (MiET) as a service provider, Ikhwezi
has supported clusters of schools and their communities in the
north-eastern corner of the Eastern Cape to improve the quality of
their children's education, as well as the overall quality of their
lives.
The Ikhwezi project is an excellent example of partnership between
a government department, an international funder and a
non-government organisation. In a couple of months its second phase
comes to an end and, although I am sorry to hear that the Swiss
Development Corporation has decided to end its involvement, I am
extremely pleased to hear that the provincial education department
is committed to continuing its good work.
So I should start by saying how grateful I am for the work of the
Swiss Development Agency and its selected service provider in
helping the provincial department to identify rural areas for local
programmes and for their advice on how to modify a local programme
to take into account particular challenges.
Ikhwezi: the project
I am going to say a few words, from the government's perspective,
about how Ikhwezi fits into the education landscape.
The Eastern Cape has more schools (over 6,000) than any other
province in South Africa. As far as schools go it is one of the big
three, together with KZN and Limpopo. Together these three
provinces have 61 per cent of all schools in South Africa. They
also have 56 per cent of all pupils (KZN has 2,6 million, EC 2
million, Limpopo, 1,7 million). The big three school provinces are
all predominantly rural provinces. It is not difficult to
understand why this is so. Urban provinces have fewer schools, but
higher pupil enrolment than rural provinces. Conversely, rural
provinces have more schools, but with fewer pupils.
I do not mention these school statistics to satisfy idle curiosity.
I do so because I want to assure you of the government's commitment
to improving the quality of education in rural schools.
The former Transkei is one of the poorest areas of South Africa. It
is rural and despite an improvement since 1994 in living standards
- better water supply, better roads, and the introduction of
electricity - jobs and resources are as scarce as they are in other
rural areas.
Of the economically active population, many are migrant workers on
the mines and in other industries in other parts of the country. In
the region, people are dependent on cattle, maize and sorghum
farming for their survival. Communities in this region devote much
of their time to the business of day-to-day survival, collecting
firewood and water and finding pasturage for their livestock. While
education is now compulsory for all children in South Africa, some
children in the region continue to take their turn to herd the
family's cattle.
Yet herding cattle has not prevented some of the country's greatest
leaders emerging from this area - Oliver Tambo for example.
A new democracy in South Africa has delivered a new order in the
administration of education. A new curriculum has been introduced
and a new vision for schools has been adopted. This vision draws in
all those who have a stake in building excellence in our schools -
learners, parents, teachers and education authorities alike.
Undoing the neglect of the past has proved a formidable task for
the Eastern Cape Department of Education. In this corner of this
vast Eastern Cape province, there are as many as half a million
primary school pupils. Of the teaching staff available to schools,
less than half are professionally qualified.
And this is where Ikwezi has made a difference. The first phase of
the project focussed on improving the quality of primary education,
trained certain members of the provincial department, trained
teachers in outcomes based education (no it is not difficult, you
just have to teach children to think for themselves), trained
school governing bodies, and trained principals in the art and
craft of school management.
However, it is one of the objectives in the second phase that I
would like to spend a few minutes addressing.
Clusters
The second phase focussed on developing 12 school clusters into
self-reliant, mutually supportive school communities with each
cluster centred around a nodal school that has a multi-media
resource centre. The centres are equipped with computers,
television sets, and a foundation library of print resources for
teachers.
The co-location of services seems to us an important means of
trying to improve the outcomes for all our children, and clusters
of schools is an obvious choice for the co-location of services
where it can be achieved.
Clustering is one of the processes that we encourage in our
education management policy framework.
Clustering schools has helped us overcome our problems with those
learning areas like maths and science where we are short of
qualified teachers. We are a developing country and we are short of
certain skills. In particular, we are short of qualified maths
teachers. We estimate that we need about 28,000 qualified teachers
and we are short of 10,000 at the moment. Of course, we employ
unqualified teachers and we do what we can to retrain them.
Our experience is that clusters encourage collegial working with
the sharing of problems, solutions and ideas. This is particularly
valuable in this area, where traditionally the district and
regional education offices have been poorly equipped and staffed
and so schools have been largely left to their own devices. This is
still in part the case, although the provincial department is
making a real effort to improve the situation.
Given such conditions the clustering of schools in a spirit of
self-help is very sensible.
Further, clustering makes a lot of sense in an environment where
schools are not well resourced and the costs of resourcing all
schools well will be prohibitive. Therefore putting resources into
a cluster centre or nodal school will allow for resources to be
used to their full, and for all schools to have access to teaching
and learning resources that they might not otherwise be able to
access.
This model could be used much more broadly in South Africa to
stretch limited resources, particularly where some schools are
already better resourced than those around them. This area of the
Eastern Cape also lends itself to such a solution, because the
schools are scattered in the villages and so can be clustered
relatively easily without participants having to travel great
distances.
The model also does not require external input, and so deals with
the problem of poor infrastructure and access to the more remote
areas. It also means that department training could be brought to
the nodal points and so stop the present situation of teachers
having to travel long distances on poor roads to get to Umtata or
other urban centres for workshops.
However, clustering is not a complete answer to limited resources
and a shortage of teachers. There are problems. Clearly these are
problems have not affected the Ikhwezi project, or if they have,
the project has been robust enough to withstand them.
The main challenge is to give the cluster a clear purpose.
Clustering for the point of clustering tends to fail quickly. The
cluster needs a clear mandate from the schools and a focused or
limited idea of what the partner schools do when they cluster and
how resources will be shared.
If the clustering seems to benefit only the nodal school, then the
cluster will die.
The projects undertaken by a cluster should be defined and if
possible have systems built up around them. So if the management
teams are meeting regularly they should have a standing agenda, a
timetable of meetings and a set of targets that the meetings are
aimed at attaining and monitoring. Clustering seems to work better
if everyone can see tangible outcomes from the partnership that
would not have been possible if individual schools had been working
alone. These results need to be enunciated and revisited regularly,
so all can celebrate success.
Within the context of the South African Schools Act the potential
advantages of clustering are huge. Whether it is clustering of
schools for fundraising, sharing resources, sharing management
challenges, sharing the same School Governing Body, as the Act
allows, you know that you are tackling that as a community and not
an isolated school.
The Ikhwezi project, participating schools, and department
officials should further be congratulated on not only producing
this working model in an area where is very difficult to succeed -
due to poverty, lack of resources, poor infrastructure, relatively
high costs - but also for taking it in new directions. It is the
first time that we in the Department have heard of a clustering
model with a management focus, which is also bringing in a health
and care component. The HIV and AIDS support role that the Sacred
Heart node includes is admirable and should be emulated
elsewhere.
I have no doubt that these schools benefit greatly by the access to
more resources, the access to a greater range of services, the
access to greater support and to a support structure. This must go
for the management teams of the schools as well. Managing schools
is not easy and being far from where policy is made makes that even
harder. If all schools could cluster in this way, many of the
problems related to sharing of information, curriculum
implementation concerns, assessment and recording techniques,
management of resources, introduction of new policies, and issues
of school safety - to name a few - would be reduced.
Close
In closing, let me say once more how pleased I am that in the deep
rural communities of Mt Frere, Lusikisiki and Bizana, the children
of Ikhwezi now benefit from schools that are better managed, better
governed by dedicated and enthusiastic parents, better connected to
the digital world, better able to support and care for those
affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and where children are excited
and stimulated by the learning experience! It is truly a pleasure
to be here.
Clusters in the Mt Ayliff mega-district
Gillespie cluster
The Gillespie cluster is served by a resource centre at Upper
Cabazana Junior Secondary School, which is not far from the main
road to the town of Mt Ayliff. The schools in this cluster
are:
The school of Mt Ayliff, with its resource centre, is located in
the town of Mt Ayliff. It is visited often because of its easy
access from Kokstad. The principal of Mt Ayliff JSS, Mrs Bam, is a
member of the Ikhwezi Project Steering Committee. The School
clusters caring for children affected by HIV/AIDS project, funded
by the European Union through the National Development Agency,
operates in this cluster. Cluster schools are:
The Dudumeni Resource Centre, housed at Dudumeni JSS, is on the
main road to Flagstaff. The School cluster communities caring for
children affected by HIV/AIDS project, funded by the European Union
through the National Development Agency, is being implemented in
this cluster.
Ethridge JSS and resource centre is on the road to Port Edward. The
fact that this road, from Bizana, is tarred, makes it easy for
cluster schools to get to the resource centre. Cluster schools
are:
Nompumalanga JSS and resource centre are on the road to Bizana. The
school is often used as a venue for training workshops and
community functions. The Ikhwezi launch was held at this venue.
Cluster schools are:
The resource centre for this cluster is housed at Qadu Junior
Secondary School, which is in the heart of the rural area of
Mbongweni. Schools in this fairly small cluster are:
Diliza Resource Centre is near the town of Flagstaff, in the
Sipaqeni Reserve. There is good transport between Flagstaff and
Holy Cross Hospital, which helps the following schools access this
resource centre.
The road to Lutshaya JSS and the resource centre that is housed
here is very bad and the resource centre can't be reached when it
is raining. Schools in this small cluster are:
The resource centre that serves the Mtontsasa cluster is at Mhlanga
JSS. This school is on the road to the beautiful Mkambati Nature
Reserve. Schools in this cluster are:
The resource centre in this cluster is housed at Sacred Heart JSS,
which is in a building owned by the Roman Catholic Church in the
centre of Flagstaff. The School clusters caring for children
affected by HIV/AIDS, funded by the European Union through the
National Development Agency, is being implemented in this cluster.
Schools in the cluster are:
Map
