After 15 years, South Africa has a new Minister of Basic Education – and she has been tasked with arguably the most challenging portfolio in the new administration.
The office is a significant position of power – it holds the largest budget and is incredibly high profile – and yet is not without its limitations, as provincial concurrent competencies and political leadership will considerably curtail her powers.
Minister Siviwe Gwarube faces the unrelenting task of addressing deeply embedded inequality as a direct result of apartheid – as well as the added challenge of rebuilding an education system that Mmusi Maimane has noted “Verwoerd would be proud of”.
The challenge, of course, is where to begin. In a system that has been set back by Covid, budget cuts and teacher retirement challenges, it is tempting to focus on the latest urgent crisis.
However, if the new minister is to systematically overhaul the system and build one that can sustainably serve all learners irrespective of their backgrounds, this cannot continue to be the case.
Granted, the minister will need a clear set of short-term priorities that will secure early wins, generate momentum and build a durable coalition for lasting change. But they will need to be transformative and ultimately aligned to some of the more complex long-term priorities that need to be addressed.
It is with this approach in mind that I propose the following list of priorities for Minister Gwarube’s administration:
- Clear out corruption: Sever the stranglehold of the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu);
- Strengthen accountability: Introduce independent evaluation authorities;
- Make schools safe: Eradicate pit latrines;
- Build capacity: Reform professional standards and target public-private partnerships; and
- Focus on learning: Measure outcomes & improve data-driven decision-making.
Clear the rot and build strong accountability mechanisms
The number one priority for the new minister must surely be clearing out corruption, chaos and chronic underperformance – as would be the case for any leader taking over a failing organisation.
For nearly 30 years, fraud, nepotism, corruption, cronyism, teacher absenteeism and chronic underperformance have continued to cripple our education system.
Sadly, Sadtu has been at the heart of much of this. Over the past three decades, it has established a track record of making “irregular” appointments – either through cadre deployment at a provincial level or the sale of posts to ambitious principals and teachers with deep pockets.
School governing bodies have frequently been found guilty of fraud and gross misuse of funds and resources. On any given day, one in 10 teachers has failed to arrive at school, leaving 135,000 learners without a teacher. On nearly every measure, we have been found to be the poorest-performing school system in the world per dollar spent.
And yet, from 2008 to 2019, union negotiations ensured that educator salaries continued to rise by an average of 9.2% in real terms, while average inflation was only 6.3% per year.
All of these data points are evidence of a system sorely lacking any rigorous or meaningful accountability measures – the ongoing absence of which continues to contribute to shocking and sustained underperformance.
With coalition governments forming, Sadtu’s power and undue influence over the education system is highly likely to be diluted. This presents the incoming minister with a unique and immediate opportunity to substantially strengthen accountability measures – and radically improve the likelihood of improved standards and a focus on outcomes.
In rebuilding the system, the first thing that the new minister must prioritise is the introduction of a national independent evaluation authority that assesses school performance, makes recommendations for improvement and follows up to ensure implementation and improvement. This can be implemented with almost immediate effect in the new budget cycle, as little to no regulatory or legislative reform is required, with the Western Cape having already established a precedent for this with the School Evaluation Authority.
At the same time, the minister should oversee the revision of recruitment and selection policies, granting managers a greater stake in the appointment of their direct reports and providing much-needed strengthening of reporting and accountability lines.
Ruthlessly and systematically dismantling Sadtu’s stranglehold will take time, and should therefore be viewed as a longer-term priority. This should be achieved primarily by decentralising collective bargaining agreements – which may require broader support across the public sector.
Further, the minister should reform union membership policy – officials, leaders and teachers should belong to separate and role-specific unions to both dismantle the current power base and eliminate current conflicts of interest.
A balanced approach to accountability (combining support with performance management) is fundamental in fostering a culture of responsibility and improvement. Effective accountability systems in countries such as Singapore, which link teacher evaluations to student performance, can provide a blueprint for implementation.
Make schools safe places where children can learn
When boiled down to their simplest form, schools are safe spaces where children can learn and develop. Most public schools in South Africa are neither.
In 1996, 9,000 public schools did not have toilets. In 2013 the national norms and standards for infrastructure were introduced, banning the use of pit latrines. However, the norms and standards appeared to be deliberately vague on key issues, regressively removed timelines for delivery and lowered the standards for provincial reporting. The result is that as of 2023 there were still 3,300 schools without toilets. Children continue to die in them, and children, especially girls, continue to miss school because of a lack of basic sanitation.
But our schools are not only unsafe – they are also not set up for learning.
South African education currently faces an enormous capacity and competency crisis at every level. Education officials are expected to support anywhere up to 50 schools with highly limited resources. Between 2012 and 2016, when we should have been hiring principals, there was a 9% decline in the number of principals employed across the country. Over the next six years, nearly half of the teacher workforce is due to retire.
Swathes of officials, leaders and teachers have been appointed illegitimately. The majority of SGBs are dysfunctional and lack the technical competency to govern effectively. Roughly 70% of principals meet the minimum requirements for school leadership, and only 14% of principals in poorer schools are classified as well qualified for the role.
A 2008 study found that maths specialist teachers averaged 66% in a Grade 6 primary maths test and the same study showed that the average score for a teacher taking a Grade 6 language test was 55%.
An immediate priority for the minister absolutely must be ensuring that every school has working toilets by the end of her first term. Given the challenges with provincial administrations and reporting, she will need to work with civil society organisations like Breadline Africa to mobilise and allocate resources efficiently and effectively.
We need better teachers and leaders – but building this capacity will take significant reform and a long time. The minister must be given time to introduce professional qualification standards for school leaders and revised recruitment processes. In the meantime, partnerships with organisations such as the Instructional Leadership Institute and Funda Wande that provide coaching and ongoing professional development must be prioritised.
It is critical to note here the significant role that the private sector and civil society must play in bringing sustainable capital and human resources to the table – both on infrastructure and professional development. If mobilised effectively, both sectors have the capacity and technical competency required to radically catalyse, accelerate and sustain the rapid rebuilding of our failing system.
One example of this would be the full subsidisation of low-fee independent schools operating in low-income communities. The South African Schools Act sets a precedent for the state to effectively outsource the provision of public education to donor-funded no-fee schools, and low-cost private schools, currently at a maximum subsidy of 60%. Increasing the subsidy to 100% would thereby increase access to affordable quality education for all, and provide a neat solution for the funding, resourcing and capacity constraints the public system currently faces.
To harness this capacity effectively, the minister would need to review current legislation and regulations. This is to ensure that the operating environment is one that is sufficiently appealing and motivating for private actors to play a role, and that the state has the requisite processes and capacity to oversee increased private engagement in the shared delivery of public services.
Make the main thing the main thing
We manage what we measure. And an education system should be measuring whether its children are learning.
Our current system is set up to measure outputs rather than outcomes. For instance, the 2023/24 DBE annual performance plan counts the number of reports submitted on performance agreements, the number of schools monitored for CAPS implementation, and the number of educators trained in digital learning programmes. These metrics are cascaded down to districts, schools, principals and teachers.
Learner outcomes are conspicuously absent in each of their KPIs, and the only time we take a reading on the performance of the entire basic education system is when our children are done with it.
By choosing to focus on the completion of activities rather than measuring quality and performance, poor outcomes are almost inevitable – and the data back this up.
A staggering 81% of 10-year-olds can’t read for meaning in any language. In the mid-2010s, nearly half of primary school learners couldn’t read or make simple inferences, and 47% of secondary school learners couldn't reach intermediate maths benchmarks.
While an 82% matric pass rate was reported last year, adjusted for dropout rates, the “actual” pass rate is roughly 49%. By the same measure, only 14 out of every 100 children who began Grade 1 in 2012 passed matric maths or physics. A mere 4% achieve a score above 60% – the pass mark needed for a STEM degree.
To ensure that quality outcomes are prioritised, the incoming minister needs to integrate learner performance into the Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS) so that all stakeholders are held accountable for educational outcomes – starting with outcomes in ECD, and followed by Foundational Literacy and Numeracy outcomes.
Over the longer term, this should be supported by the introduction of regular, low-stakes assessments that monitor the performance of the system over time (as the Western Cape does with the systemics in Grades 3, 6 and 9) so that education officials, leaders and teachers have valid, reliable and accurate diagnostics that can be used to track progress and inform curriculum delivery and learning interventions.
Successful schools and high-performing education systems achieve great things by focusing on what matters. Children are sent to school to be educated, and how well they are educated is therefore the single most important impact metric.
By prioritising learner outcomes above all else, setting high standards of achievement and introducing tools to monitor progress against these targets, the entire system has the opportunity to undergo a seismic shift in focus, with all policies, implementation plans and resources following suit.
Any efforts to sustainably improve the education system without first addressing corruption will be like pouring water on sand. Minister Gwarube therefore has to begin by tackling Sadtu and improving accountability.
This must be followed by building safe schools, and the capacity we need to teach our children well. As this will take time, public-private partnerships have to be prioritised to accelerate progress. And with corruption-free, safe schools filled with ready and willing teachers and leaders – we must begin to focus not on what the adults are doing, but on how much our children are learning.
Clear the rot, build the foundations, focus on what matters. Keep measuring progress, iterating and adapting. This is how the highest-performing systems implement, scale and sustain their success. The evidence is there, as are the resources.
With a new leader at the helm, the hope is that we now have the courage, conviction and political will we so desperately need to overhaul the system and put our children first. DM
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