Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
even where schools had received workbooks, they were often in the wrong languages, making it difficult for pupils to use them.17
So poor was delivery in Limpopo, in particular, that in 2012 a non-governmental organisation called Section27 took the Department of Basic Education to court to compel it to provide textbooks to a number of schools that still remained without them five months into the school year. The shortfall affected all grades at these schools, but the negative impact was most keenly felt in grades 1, 2, 3 and 10, where a new curriculum had been introduced but could not be taught without new textbooks. Though the North Gauteng High Court ordered the department to deliver all the necessary textbooks by June 2012, three months later many of the textbooks had still not been provided. The minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga (who was reappointed to this position after the May 2014 general election), blamed this on ‘sabotage’. But by September 2012 more than 70 000 textbooks had still not been delivered, prompting another court order for this to be done by the following month.18
Given that the government had budgeted some R6.5 billion for textbooks, workbooks, and other learner support material in the 2012/13 financial year, a lack of money was unlikely to be the key problem. Comments Myburgh: ‘The inability of government to get textbooks and workbooks to schools in Limpopo, and who knows where else, … cannot be put down to … a lack of resources … It is rather the result of extreme state dysfunctionality with the civil service no longer able to perform even the most routine bureaucratic tasks.’19
Outcomes-based education
To provide redress for the alleged ‘rote learning’ of the apartheid era, the government also introduced a new system of teaching and learning, known as outcomes-based education (OBE). This was incorporated in a new curriculum, called Curriculum 2005, which was gradually introduced into schools from 1995 onwards, beginning with Grade 1. The new curriculum did little to guide teachers as to the specific content to be taught, for the idea was that they and their pupils would ‘jointly construct the curriculum’.
Said Penny Vinjevold, deputy director-general of education, in 2009: ‘Curriculum 2005 underspecified the content and was over designed with jargon. Teachers didn’t know what to teach, there was no testing, and the idea was that all children must progress to the next grade … The experiment was disastrous. The schools with the least resources in townships and rural areas suffered the most.’20
Though a revised ‘national curriculum statement’ was thereafter phased in from 2002 to 2008, many of the corrosive effects of OBE were still not adequately addressed. According to Jonathan Jansen, rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, many teachers fundamentally misunderstood OBE, believing that the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic had become less important as ‘kids were now expected to learn by themselves and teachers were not the centre anymore’.21
In 2010 The Times newspaper reported that the OBE system had seen ‘more than five million pupils leaving school unable to read or write adequately’. That same year, Zweli Mkhize, chairman of the ANC’s health and education committee and premier of KwaZulu-Natal, said the ruling party had been ‘pushed into rethinking its education policies because of the huge number of pupils who could not read or write. It had to act on an avalanche of complaints from pupils, teachers, and parents’.22
More reforms were introduced, this time in the form of ‘curriculum and assessment policy statements’ (Caps). These were intended to give teachers detailed guidance as to what they must teach, while also equipping them with textbooks and learning materials for every grade. Motshekga said ‘a massive training drive would be launched for teachers to enable them to handle the new curriculum’. However, these successive changes have left many teachers confused and resentful of change, further undermining commitment and morale. In 2009 Mugwena Maluleke, general secretary of the biggest teachers’ union, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu), said ‘teachers had been subjected to three major curriculum reviews in the past ten years, which had included fundamental changes in learning area definition and content, as well as new teaching and assessment methods. This had been accompanied by additional administration and paperwork, all carried out with only minimal support and training from the side of the department.’23
Jansen warns that OBE has caused the country enormous damage. Hundreds of millions of rands have been spent on training teachers, developing materials, conducting expensive evaluations, and ‘writing and rewriting learning guides’, he says. At the same time, a vital ‘window of opportunity’ to build a sound new school system has been lost – and South Africa now has to ‘undo the intertwined damage of apartheid as well as OBE’.24
Little value for money
Education is the biggest item on the national budget, generally absorbing some 21% of annual revenue. State spending on education amounts to roughly 6% of gross domestic product (GDP), which is significantly more than most other developing countries are able to achieve. In addition, South Africa’s teachers are among the highest paid in the world in purchasing power parity terms, as the National Planning Commission has pointed out. Yet educational outcomes remain dismal. In the words of Trevor Manuel, then minister in the presidency: national planning commission, South Africa ‘fails to get bang for its education buck’.25
OBE, an increasingly ineffective bureaucracy, and the various other problems earlier identified have all helped to undermine the quality of schooling. Equally important are the shortcomings in the short-cut method that was used to upgrade the qualifications of African teachers and put them on the same pay scales as their better-qualified white counterparts.
This method led to a quick increase in the proportion of qualified African teachers, which jumped from 37% in 1990 to 93% in 2009 (whereas the proportion of qualified white teachers remained very much the same). However, it also allowed these teachers to gain higher qualifications based simply on their experience (or ‘prior learning’), coupled with their completion of brief training courses. But these courses – generally offered part-time by universities – did little to improve their subject knowledge or pedagogical skills.26 The upshot, writes Nic Taylor, head of the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (Needu), is a ‘disjuncture between qualifications and competence’. The further consequence is that the quality of teaching has generally remained very poor, while accountability for performance has been undermined. In addition, these problems have not been helped by the resistance of a major teachers’ union, Sadtu, to school inspections and other attempts to monitor and improve teacher performance.
In recent years a number of studies have highlighted poor teacher performance as the key factor undermining the quality of schooling. In 2007 a report by the Development Bank of Southern Africa, a state-funded developmental institution, said that some 80% of public schools were dysfunctional – largely because teachers were absent or failed to teach. Teacher absenteeism was a particular problem in the poorest schools, where 97% to 100% of principals complained of it.27
In 2011 a ‘diagnostic overview’ by the National Planning Commission said: ‘Teachers spend too little time in contact with learners, and lack basic pedagogical ability and subject knowledge.’ The commission also quoted recent research by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), a state-funded research body, which found that 20% of teachers were absent on Mondays and Fridays, while absenteeism rates rose to 33% at month end. Moreover, said the HSRC report: ‘Teachers in African schools teach an average of 3.5 hours a day compared with 6.5 hours a day at former white schools.’ In addition, ‘strike action … consumes as much as ten days a year; holding union meetings in school time is often the norm in townships; while procedures for dismissing teachers for misconduct are complex, time-consuming, and rare as a result’.28
These problems have yet to be addressed. In October 2011 further research by both the HSRC and the Department of Basic Education showed that ‘teachers commonly do not complete the curriculum, teach too slowly, do not develop concepts, set insufficient written work, and provide pupils with few opportunities to read. Many teachers come late to school, leave early, spend only 46% of their time teaching each week, and hardly teach at all on Fridays’.29
In May 2013 a report on ‘the state of literacy teaching and learning’ in the foundation phase (grades 1 to 3), came