Good Morning ladies and gentlemen

The aim of the statement is to elaborate on some of the key education themes addressed by Premier David Makhura in the State of the Province Address.

Education plays a pivotal role in preparing young people for post school opportunities by providing key knowledge, competencies and skills. To that end, it is a key enabler of the Gauteng Province’s vision for Transformation, Modernisation and Re-industrialisation.

Online Admission

The Gauteng Department of Education introduced the online admission system to ensure equity, eliminate queues at schools and provide accurate and timely information to enable planning.

The campaign has been a relative success – obviously with some challenges. A substantial number of learners around 80% were placed by August 2016. This enabled the Department to plan around provision of Learning and Teaching Support Material (LTSM); educators; classrooms and infrastructure; as well as school furniture.

Further, 19 000 new applications were received through the 62 walk-in centers that the Department had set up in January 2017.

The Department worked hard and within two weeks in January 2017 had placed a substantial number of both learners that had applied online and those that applied for the first time in January.

The Department is pleased to announce that the number of unplaced learners has been eliminated to 0.

The department will continue to use the online application system for 2018 learner admission into public schools. Several lessons have been learnt. We have been working on technical challenges experienced in the last admission period. There are improvements with regard to the application and more enhancements to infrastructure and the App features. Technical improvements include the following:-

• Upgrading of the current server infrastructure to accommodate over 30 000 hits per second.
• ID Verification from Department of Home Affairs will be integrated.
• GPS will be integrated to ensure that geographic locations are correct.

We will work with e-Government Department to further refine and improve the online application, as a pilot for government wide applications for services.  We urge parents to take the opportunity and apply early. Details will be released on due course.

Building of New Schools

The admission challenge has brought into sharp relief the need for more schools and classrooms in Gauteng. Initial estimate indicate that the province requires 200 additional schools to deal with historical backlog and meet new demand.

Since 2014, we have built forty-three new schools, including new ICT-enabled classrooms in existing schools.

This year, the department will officially open new thirteen (13) brick and mortar schools and build schools built out of Alternative Construction Technology (ACT) to alleviate admission pressure.

To that end, we will continue to open a school every month. In January 2017, we opened Nomzamo Madikizela Mandela Primary School in Braamfischerville, Soweto. This Sunday (5 March 2017), together with the Department of Infrastructure Development (DID), we will officially open the Soshanguve East Secondary School.

The new brick and mortar schools include the following:-

1. Nellmapius Secondary;
2. Braamfischer Primary;
3. Garankuwa Primary;
4. Bophelong Secondary;
5. Rethabiseng Primary;
6. Moses Kotane Primary;
7. Nkone Maruping Primary;
8. Olivenhoutbosch Secondary;
9. Nokuthula LSEN school;
10.Menzi primary;
11. Julius Sebolai primary;
12. Everest primary; and
13. Tinasonke primary.

Township schools recorded the largest increases in matric passes for 2016

We have narrowed the performance gap between fee-paying and non-fee paying schools from 27% in 2011 to 11% in 2016.

The provincial pass rate has increased from 84.2% in 2015 to 85.1% in 2016.  Most importantly, Gauteng contributed a remarkable 23% of all Bachelor passes in the country and 22% of all distinctions. It also has a high proportion of schools achieving 100% pass rate.
The quality of performance is spread evenly in all the districts, with 14 out 15 districts recording a pass rate of 80% and more. However, all our districts surpassed the national average in the matric pass rate. Township schools have recorded the largest increases in matric passes for 2016.

We are proud that out of 33 schools that obtained 100% during the 2016 NSC results, 8 were from the townships.

Secondary School Intervention Programme (SSIP)

We are focussing on whole school improvement across the system. The SSIP program, which has been reviewed, is part of the broader strategy, focusing on putting learners in CAMPS during the holidays. We are engaging with universities to use their hostels. High quality tuition to be provided by expert tutors that have shown evidence of providing sustained quality results in their subjects.

The program is differentiated and caters for the progressed learners and also have special programs for learners that have potential to ensure access to Higher Education Institutions (HEI). The learners during the camps are to be provided with other support that includes:

• Leadership skills
• study skills,
• time management
• motivational talks

So far, the school based programs are being implemented in all districts. We have started processes to plan for the first camp for approximately 800 high risk learners during the coming Easter holidays. We are requesting support from all public schools with hostels to accommodate the learners in the camps. The support for learners that opted to write supplementary exams is being implemented in various sites in each district.

Other interventions have been identified for the following schools

• 33 Public schools that have achieved less than 60% in the NSC exams
• MEC oversight at 8 schools with less than 50%
• Prioritised focus at 25 schools that achieved less than 60%

Schools of Specialisation

This year, we will launch another school of specialisation, Magaliesburg Secondary School in Gauteng West District. The school will focus in Maths, Science and ICT with more emphasis in Agriculture.

Schools ICT Roll Out

The rollout of ICT to schools is well on track. The provincial government took a phased approach, having to strike a balance between competing yet very pressing educational and infrastructure needs. The programme is biased towards township no-fee paying schools as a way to manage redress but also positioning ICT as a game changer in education transformation. 

GDE is converting over 2 300 Grade 11 classrooms into smart classrooms in the current rollout and 9 000 educators have been issued laptops as teaching resources. Over 60 000 learners in matric, in 377 townships schools are benefiting from ICT programmes. All Grade 12 and 11 educators in ICT enabled schools were provided training to integrate ICT into education.

Dignity Packs

Currently 250 000 girl learners in Gauteng are receiving dignity packs. The department is committed to increase the number to 1 million in 2019.