STAFF REPORTER

BASIC Education Minister Angie Motshekga has wished various education stakeholders a happy autumn school holiday 

“As we close out the first term in ordinary public schools, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation for your unwavering commitment to ensuring that all learners are allowed to receive a quality basic education,” she said last Friday.

Despite the complexity of the task amid rising potential learners and fewer available places, Motshekga said teachers have gone “above and beyond to ensure that all learners who want to learn are placed in ordinary public schools.

“I am truly grateful. Our teachers, principals, and education managers, such as district directors, have shown remarkable resilience and determination in dealing head-on with daily challenges. In the same vein, I would also like to give a special shout-out to the parents, schooling communities, and caregivers who have supported learners and us following the devastations of families due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Motshekga said the term has been a resounding success, with all schooling days being utilised for learning and teaching, except in unique circumstances where there were disruptive service delivery protests.

“Despite the challenges faced in the basic education sector, provincial education departments have taken proactive measures to address the issue. Specifically, they have allocated funds to identified schools in Gauteng and Western Cape to build additional brick-and-mortar classrooms,” she said.

INSIDE EDUCATION

Teachers in England will strike on Thursday 27 April and Tuesday 2 May after members of the UK’s largest education union rejected a pay offer.

Teachers were offered a £1,000 one-off payment this year, and a 4.3% rise next year. Starting salaries would also rise to £30,000 from September.

The results of the NEU ballot found that 98% of members were in favour of turning the deal down.

The education secretary said it was “extremely disappointing”.

The National Education Union (NEU) described the offer as “insulting” and said it has “united the profession in its outrage”.

Speaking at the annual conference in Harrogate, Joint General Secretaries Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney said the offer was “not fully funded” and did not deal with the shortage of teachers in schools.

In a ballot over the government’s pay offer, 191,319 NEU members voted to reject the deal with a 66% turnout.

After hearing the announcement, delegates at the conference chanted “come on Gill, pay the bill”.

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said the NEU’s decision to reject the pay offer “will simply result in more disruption for children and less money for teachers today”.

“The offer was funded, including major new investment of over half a billion pounds, in addition to the record funding already planned for school budgets,” she said.

Ms Keegan said pay will now be decided by the independent pay review body, which will recommend pay rises for next year. This means the £1,000 payment for this year will not happen.

During a visit to Rochdale, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the news of new strike dates was “extremely disappointing” following “a very reasonable pay offer”.

Ms Bousted confirmed plans to support GCSE and A-level students during the upcoming strike days and said head teachers will make sure those pupils are in class for exam preparations.

Following the vote, Ms Bousted called on ministers to “reopen negotiations” on pay.

On Tuesday at the NEU conference, members will vote on three more potential strike days at the end of June and the beginning of July, but this would have to be approved by the NEU executive.

Teacher salaries fell by an average of 11% between 2010 and 2022, after taking inflation into account, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Most state school teachers in England had a 5% rise in 2022.

The government says it is giving schools an extra £2.3bn over the next two years. Most of the pay rise would have come from this money; schools would have received extra funding for the £1,000 one-off payment and 0.5% of the pay increase for next year.

Luke Sibieta, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said schools budgets could only absorb “a small amount” of the pay offer and that some schools are already seeing costs growing faster than funding.

The Education Policy Institute (EPI) says there is “only just enough headroom” to cover the current pay offer.

Natalie Perera, the Chief Executive of the EPI, warned that the current funding “does not compensate schools for the additional support they have had to provide for increasingly vulnerable pupils”.

Attending the conference, Sanj Beri, a secondary school science teacher from Nottingham, said the last thing teachers want to do is strike, but that “proper funding for our schools” is needed.

He said his school is struggling to recruit science teachers because people “don’t want to do the job anymore” due to “the amount of stress and workload for the pay you get”.

Katie Cooke, an NEU member from Tunstall in Stoke-on-Trent, took part in the first teacher strike earlier this year, but says she cannot afford to take part in any more as she does not get paid when striking

“As a single parent… I am struggling with the cost of living, with inflation, and feeding my family. Holidays are out of the picture… all the while I’m in a teaching profession at a reasonably high level.”

Reacting to the news of the forthcoming strikes at a park in Harrogate, Lauren Jevins says she understands the teachers’ position but wishes matters could be resolved in a different way, rather than industrial action.

She said taking more time off work to care for her children will mean losing out on money for everyday essentials.

Jacob Matthews is also frustrated at the prospect of more strikes and feels there needs to be a compromise.

“Inflation is nearly 11%, no-one is going to get that kind of pay rise… but I’m a parent, not a teacher and I know it’s not as simple as that”.

Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said he was disappointed and wants to see everybody “getting around the table and resolving these issues”.

The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davy, also said the government needs to “get around the table” and negotiate with the teachers’ unions.

Devolved issue

The NEU is not the only union which is involved in pay discussions.

Three other unions have also been involved in intensive talks with the government: the NASUWT, Association of School and College Leaders and school leaders’ union NAHT. They are in the process of balloting members on the current offer from the government.

School leaders’ union, the NAHT, is also asking whether members would take industrial action if the pay offer is rejected. NAHT members voted in favour of strike action in January – but turnout was 42%, below the legal requirement of 50%.

Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, from the NEU, also questioned why teachers in England were “worth less” that those in Scotland and Wales. Education is a devolved matter, meaning decisions are made by the separate governments.

In Scotland, the dispute has been resolved after teachers accepted a 7% rise for 2022/23, which will be backdated to April. They have also accepted a 5% rise in April 2023, and a 2% rise in January 2024.

In Wales, the NEU, have agreed on an increased pay offer of 8% for 2022/23, which consists of a 6.5% annual pay rise and a one-off lump sum payment, as well as a 5% pay rise for 2023/24.

But Wales’ school leaders’ union, NAHT Cymru, has rejected the offer and says funding arrangements remain a major concern for school leaders. Members are continuing to take action short of strikes – which includes refusing to attend evening meetings and only responding to calls and emails between 09:00 and 15:00 BST.

In Northern Ireland, five teaching unions in will also strike for a full day on Wednesday 26 April.

Additional reporting by Nathan Standley and Rahib Khan.

EDWIN NAIDU

MINISTER of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Dr Blade Nzimande, launched the 2023 Tertiary Institutions Youth Campaign at uMfolozi TVET College, Eshowe campus in KwaZulu-Natal on Friday.

This provincial launch follows the national launch, which was held at Rhodes University, in the Eastern Cape on 7 March 2023.

The objectives of the campaign are to:
 Promote a civic culture of ongoing engagements and exchange of ideas within
institutions of higher learning through targeted CDE programmes;
 Engage students’ views about electoral democracy and impact of participation
thereof through debates;
 Promote Online Voter Registration to students within institutions of higher learning across the Republic;
 Conduct on-campus voter registration using the Voter Management Device
and;
 Empower the students’ electorate with information to participate meaningfully
in democratic & electoral processes.

Nzimande said the department wants to improve the capacity of the Post-School Education and Training (PSET) system to meet the skills needs and development of the country.

The Department has oversight over four main categories of PSET institutions, namely: public and private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs); Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges, Community Education and Training (CET) colleges and private colleges.

“The reality is that young people need to take a stand and constructively engage on socio-political issues. No country can succeed if it does not invest in the future of young people to become tomorrow’s leaders,” he said.

As part of a commitment to expand access to higher education for students from poor and working-class backgrounds, the number of students funded by NSFAS increased from 580,000 in 2018 to 770,000 in 2021. For the current financial year, NSFAS has approved the provisional funding of a record of 1,083,055 students. The budget is projected to be around R47.6 billion.

Nzimande thanked the Electoral Commission of South Africa for involving all post-school education and training institutions in launching this Annual Tertiary Institutions Civic and Democracy Education (CDE) Youth Campaign at uMfolozi TVET College.

INSIDE EDUCATION

EDWIN NAIDU

A WEBSITE launched under the leadership of University of KwaZulu Natal’s Environmental Fluid Mechanics Lab (EFML) Co-Director, Dr Justin Pringle, can provide real-time guidance to beachgoers in Durban regarding the safety of water at popular beaches for swimming.

This comes after the increase in sewage pollution along the coastline, with Durban’s beaches often demonstrating critically high levels of Escherichia coli (E. coli), a harmless bacteria found in the guts of healthy people and animals that indicates the presence of faecal matter in the water.

While E. coli decays rapidly in a marine environment, making it a less-than-ideal indicator, harmful pathogens from sewage pollution may still be present and threaten human and aquatic health, causing diseases including cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever, and more.

In response to these challenges and in the interest of providing scientific information to the public, Pringle launched Woz’Olwandle, meaning “come to the sea” in isiZulu. Based on a tool developed for Los Angeles beaches in the United States (US), the Beach Report Card, the Woz’Olwandle website features information synthesised by a fluid dynamics computer model that was developed by UKZN’s Professor Derek Stretch (who heads up the EFML with Pringle) and alumnus Mr Dave Mardon, now an Associate at Water Environment Ltd in the United Kingdom, in the early 2000s.

This model was repurposed to process several data and estimate the concentrations of E. coli at six central Durban beaches over 24 hours, using a key of three “smiley” icons in green, orange, or red to indicate whether conditions are “good”, “acceptable”, or “poor”.

The website is hosted on a US server to prevent outages caused by ongoing load-shedding in South Africa.

Pringle hopes that the tool will not only provide the most up-to-date information for people to use in deciding if and where to swim but also spark discussion about the problem of sewage pollution and potential solutions. Real-time information is important because other information provided on water quality takes time to gather, analyse, and release, often making it out of date by the time users receive it.

The Woz’Olwandle website has already attracted attention for its efforts with 3 500 visits over the past month, from South Africa, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, and Germany.

INSIDE EDUCATION

ANN BERNSTEIN

IN February 2023, a Soweto school governing body treasurer lamented: “We’re dealing with gangsters in the education department; they’re out to loot schools … We’re calling for help from law enforcement or the Special Investigating Unit.”

In case anyone thinks this was an isolated incident, the 2022 Corruption Watch report, Sound the Alarm, confirmed that education was one of the top three areas in which complaints of corruption were reported by the public the other two were policing and state – owned enterprises.

The most common education complaints were misappropriation of resources 45%, maladministration 17%, abuse of authority victimisation of whistleblowers 15%, “sextortion”, bribery for jobs and flouting recruitment processes 12%, and procurement irregularities 11%.

Public awareness of these issues goes back nearly a decade. In April 2014, City Press journalists revealed that a jobs-for-cash racket was being run by members of the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union Sadtu , the largest of its kind in the country. Principal and deputy principal positions were routinely sold for between R30 000 and R45 000 in KwaZulu-Natal, while investigations of similar transgressions were under way in Limpopo and North – West.

PAYING OFFICIALS

Sitting principals, the reporters revealed, had been ousted from their posts, under threat of their lives, and replaced by candidates who admitted having secured their positions by paying Sadtu officials.

These officials would then coerce sometimes violently members of school governing bodies SGBs to select their preferred candidates. Alternatively, Sadtu members would collaborate in getting favoured individuals on to SGBs to ensure that those who had paid for positions obtained them. There were also accounts of kidnapping and, in one instance, murder.

Despite initially downplaying reports of the scandal, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga eventually took decisive action by appointing a task team to investigate the allegations. Professor John Volmink, then chairperson of Umalusi, the national school certification and accreditation body, was appointed to head the ministerial task team (MTT).

The MTT interviewed district managers, teachers and union officials around the country. Forensic members of the team, drawn from auditing firm Deloitte and the department of justice, followed up on specific allegations.

On February 29 2016, the team submitted its 285page report to the minister, who released it publicly on May 21 that year, following sustained pressure from the media, civil society and parents.

Criminal practices identified by the MTT ranged from petty corruption to murder. The rot was so extensive that a top North-West education official reportedly declared that his department had “so many cases of wrongdoing that if he asked the SA Police Service SAPS to follow them up, it would amount to closing down the department”.

CORRUPT PROCUREMENT

The Gauteng department of education reported that it was aware of corrupt procurement and recruitment processes, including maladministration by SGBs when selecting and appointing teachers to top positions.

Investigators noted that malpractice had become so normalised that people were living and working in a climate of fear, and that there was a “culture of silence” regarding wrongdoing.

In addition to pervasive corruption, the MTT identified cadre deployment as a major barrier to the effective functioning of the education system. Cadre deployment would later be recognised and defined by the report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture as the unlawful and unconstitutional practice of appointing loyal “cadres to strategic positions in the state and state employment”.

The authors of the MTT report expressed grave concerns about the “enormous power and influence by a union which seeks to entrench itself repeatedly and inexorably”. It ultimately found that Sadtu was “in de facto charge of the management, administration and priorities of education” in “six and possibly more of the nine provinces”.

Stop and read that again. Its implications are shocking. Sadtu’s control reduces accountability and ultimately misdirects the focus of the entire bureaucracy. Loyalty based appointments have a doubly negative effect: they bring people into the bureaucracy who may not be able to do the job, creating a set of incentives and an institutional culture in which appropriate, capable people are overlooked and become despondent.

Sadtu’s capture of the education system is a key reason for South Africa’s dismal academic performance. When our pupils take international tests, we are ranked as either last or among the bottom three countries.

While other countries test grade 4s, we test grade 5s. When they test grade 8s, we test grade 9s. The deficiency has a knock-on effect that can only be closed by upgrading the quality of teachers instructing our children.

The MTT made several important recommendations to address corruption and state capture.

These included adopting a zero tolerance stance on corruption, identifying and reporting corrupt individuals to the SAPS for criminal prosecution, protecting whistleblowers from possible reprisals by creating a specialised division in the department, professionalising the bureaucracy by preventing managers from belonging to the same unions as the teachers they supervised, removing the power of SGBs to recommend appointments and renegotiating the observer status unions enjoyed in hiring and promotion processes.

It is now nine years since the jobs-for-cash story broke in City Press and nearly seven years since the release of the MTT report. Volmink told the Centre for Development and Enterprise CDE in September 2019 and again in February 2023 that, as far as he was aware, not a single recommendation from the report had been implemented and not a single individual implicated in wrongdoing had been prosecuted.

This was echoed by education experts Dr Nic Spaull and department of basic education researcher Dr Stephen Taylor in July 2022.

Rooting out corruption and ending cadre deployment are the first steps in a process of systemwide education reforms. Sadtu aligned officials who benefit from the status quo must be stopped from blocking attempts to implement such reforms, or they will fail.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

This is not an argument against unions in the education sector. Teachers are entitled to form unions, as are officials and managers and teachers is obvious. It is also true that many committed and capable individual teachers are members of Sadtu.

What needs to be tackled urgently is the capture of the education system by Sadtu at the expense of both teachers and pupils.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has made anticorruption efforts a priority of his tenure. The graft and state capture exposed in the education sector are as devastating as they are in the rest of government.

The groundwork has already been laid by the MTT report. It is time for all of us senior government leaders, civil society, political parties, business, parents and the public at large to openly acknowledge the reality of state capture and corruption in education, and push for measures that will end it. We cannot allow another generation of pupils in our schools to be condemned to an appalling education.

South Africa urgently needs education reform that addresses the root causes of systemic dysfunction.

Written by Ann Bernstein, head of the CDE. This article is based on The Silent Crisis: Time to Fix SA’s Schools, a new series of five CDE reports.

AISHA MALIK

GOOGLE is rolling out new Chrome and Classroom features for teachers and students, the company announced on Tuesday. The tech giant is adding a new “reading mode” for Chrome, an AI-powered Hand Raise Gesture Detection feature for Meet and more.

The new “reading mode” is a customizable reader view coming to the side panel in the company’s browser.

The new feature is designed to help students with dyslexia and ADHD. Reading mode reduces distracting elements on the screen, like images and videos, to help users focus on a page’s primary content. You can also customize settings like the typeface, font size and spacing, along with the text and background color. Reading mode will be available in the Chrome browser in ChromeOS in M114.

The new AI-powered Hand Raise Gesture Detection feature, which is coming to all Google Workspace for Education users, is designed to make meetings more natural.

When you physically raise your hand, Meet will automatically raise the Hand Raise icon and move you to the main grid. The new feature will roll out in the coming months.

Google is also launching the ability for two or more teachers to manage slides together through a new “co-presenting” feature that’s rolling out in the coming months.

Another new Google Classroom feature will give educators the ability to add interactive questions to a YouTube video and assign it to students. As the video plays, students can answer the questions, get real-time feedback on their responses and rewatch the video again if needed.

Educators can receive insights about their students’ progress, like which questions they struggled with.

The beta version of this feature will be available in English, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese and Spanish.

In addition, Google announced a new “practice sets” feature that uses AI to help educators turn their existing teaching content into interactive assignments and provide more personalized support. Practice sets will be available globally in English in the coming weeks, with plans for additional languages in the future.

“As teachers add questions to their practice set, they’ll see suggestions for skills to focus on — like solving equations with decimals or writing thesis statements,” the company wrote in a blog post.

“Based on the skills selected, students will receive helpful hints if they get stuck. Through auto-generated insights, practice sets also help educators quickly identify gaps in understanding at both the class and student level, so they can tailor their approach. Educators can even share practice sets with other verified teachers in their domain.”

Google also announced that it’s adding new updates for Screencast, which is its tool that lets educators record and share lessons.

The company is expanding recording and transcription support to a dozen new languages, including Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish.

In addition, Google is releasing a web player so students and teachers can watch screencasts in any browser on any device. Lastly, Google is introducing demo tools that allow users to animate clicks and taps and highlight any keyboard shortcuts they use on the screen. The new updates will begin rolling out to ChromeOS 112 users in early April.

Google initially launched a slew of new features for teachers and students during the pandemic when schools closed, but has since still steadily been introducing new online-based education features for both teachers and students.

Techcrunch

EDWIN NAIDU

CABINET has approved the final version of the STI Decadal Plan, and implementation is already underway, focusing mainly on tackling grand societal challenges and addressing priorities, such as climate change and environmental sustainability, according to Department of Science and Innovation Director-General Dr Phil Mjwara.

The plan aims to address:

– Societal grand challenges: Climate change and environmental sustainability; future- proof education and skills; and the future of society.
– STI priorities: Modernising sectors of the economy (manufacturing, agriculture and mining); new sources of growth (the digital and circular economies); health innovation; energy innovation; innovation-enabled capable state; and innovation in support of social progress.

Mjwara told the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education, Science and Technology last Friday that the National Development Plan sees human capital development as central to addressing South Africa’s unemployment, poverty and inequality challenges.

Transformation was pivotal to the plan. To this end, he said A Department of Science and Innovation task team had been established to co-create a robust, evidence-based transformation agenda for the next ten years.

Furthermore, he said the team would seek to identify reforms and actions to be implemented by the DSI and its entities over the 2020-2025 cycle to enhance transformation outcomes.

INSIDE EDUCATION

EDWIN NAIDU

THE Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Dr Blade Nzimande, met with German Minister of Research and Education, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, during her recent two-day visit to South Africa.

The Ministers signed a declaration to establish a joint Research Chair on Just Energy Transition.

Ahead of the signing, which took place in Cape Town last week, the German Minister visited the Hydrogen Catalysis (HYSA catalysis) Centre of Competence at the University of Cape Town.

Both Ministers addressed the Research Networks for Health Innovation in Sub- Saharan Africa (RHISSA) conference, which took place at the Vineyard Hotel in Newlands Cape Town.

The German Minister’s visit is aimed at, among others, strengthening bilateral relations and celebrating the success of the German-funded Research Networks for Health Innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa (RHISSA) programme.

The RHISSA has seen an investment of 50 million Euros over five years.

The programme is in its second phase.

Minister Stark-Watzinger also visited the Square Kilometre Array site in the Northern Cape in anticipation of full German membership of SKAO.

INSIDE EDUCATION

EDWIN NAIDU

UMALUSI has launched a newly implemented Online Application System for Replacement Certificates.

Candidates can access the system from anywhere (home or office) via a cellphone or personal computer to apply directly to Umalusi to replace their lost or damaged certificates.

Umalusi Council sets and monitors standards for general and further education and training in South Africa.

The Council is tasked with developing and managing a sub-framework of qualifications for general and further education and training and for the attendant quality assurance.

The new system was launched during a webinar, “Innovatively replacing your lost or damaged certificate issued by Umalusi”, on 30 March.

The purpose was to reduce the turnaround time and costs of replacing a lost or damaged certificate.

At the cost of R137.00, a candidate can collect a replacement certificate from Umalusi within two workings days of the application. Alternatively, a candidate can pay R202.00 (R137.00 for the certificate and R65.00 for courier fees) to have the certificate sent within 7 working days to their chosen physical address anywhere within the borders of South Africa.

The webinar was attended by officials from education stakeholder organisations in South Africa, Botswana Examinations Council (BEC) and Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC).

INSIDE EDUCATION