Basic Education not a priority for ANC-led government

Speaker, I’m sad to say that with the ANC in government in South Africa, mud schools are here to stay.

Pit toilets are here to stay and we are going to see more sexual assaults, violence as well as drugs sold on school properties. Poor teaching by underqualified teachers is also here to stay!

Primary school learners will struggle to properly grasp Maths and Science. We have policy failure, management failure, teaching failure and funding failure in our schools.

I wish I could say I was exaggerating or scare-mongering with these comments but unfortunately, deep down, we all instinctively know that I am not. I wish it were not so.

The DA has been visiting schools over the past few months, like the Mbhekwana High School in Limpopo where some pupils are part of gangs and one learner stabbed another at the school gate.

The Department of Education in Limpopo seems unaware of the gangs and even if they are aware, are doing absolutely nothing about it.

The police were warned by parents about the gang activity, and have done nothing about it – but there’s more.

Young Thabala Mashiane was stabbed to death in the principal’s office at Solomon Mahlangu High School in Modimolle.

In March, a 14-year-old learner from Mbangezike High School was killed. On 23 February, an 18-year-old high school pupil appeared in a Limpopo court for stabbing a fellow pupil who died on route to the hospital.

The DA also visited Isivivane Secondary School in the Eastern Cape. At that school last year, 100% of the matric learners failed their exams.

On the day I visited the school, all four teachers including the principal were not on site. One had taken the matriculants to a jobs expo, one was sick, one was at a departmental meeting and the fourth was presumably just taking a day off!

The DA also visited the Isisusa Secondary School, south of Durban. There, the pass rate plummeted to a dismal 26% last year. We visited Bothithong High School in Kuruman where 30 learners had fallen pregnant.

What we have learned on these visits is that most provincial education departments – the Department of Basic Education, the South African Police Service, the Department of Social Development and the Department of Justice are completely unprepared to deal with the crisis in education faced by young learners every single day in South Africa.

But just when you thought you had heard the worst, the ANC tables the 2018/2019 budget for us to vote on this month here in Parliament.

It shows a massive R7 billion budget cut to basic education over the next three years. But this is not the first sign of cutting.

As Nic Spaull accurately pointed out in the Business Day on 16 April this year: “to put it bluntly, funding per child has declined 8% in seven years.”

So where has all the money gone? Well, apart from the corruption of the ANC, it has gone to plug the hole created at universities through demands for free higher education.

The ANC and EFF have thrown your children’s education under the bus so that they can get free university education which will be hard for incoming students to pass because they have been deprived of quality Maths and Science education in primary school owing to the budget cuts.

In addition, teachers’ salaries have increased against an 8% decline in budget, which means that now over 80% of the budget is used for salaries, instead of school infrastructure, computers, libraries, science labs, scholar transport, and so on.

The matric pass mark is not going to go up and if it does, you already know that it’s going to be because schools are going to quietly hold back all marginal learners and push them out of the system, or because Umalusi is going to adjust the final marks upwards.

You can’t radically cut budgets and fail to improve teacher on-the-job training and expect better results.

Now let me get to the final catastrophe facing children in school. The Director-General of Basic Education recently reminded us that over 80% of school teachers in the system have a less than adequate education, particularly in the area of subject knowledge, in order to prepare learners for numeracy, literacy and final matric subjects.

So what, you may ask me, is the DA doing about all of this? Let me quickly list some of the things:

1. Apart from oversight visits, we have met with the South African Council of Educators to establish why they are not vetting teachers properly who may have committed sexual and violent crimes and have agreed to a follow up meeting where they will give us feedback about their meetings with Departments of Justice and Social Development. Believe it or not they have not accessed the Sexual Offences Register once in the past two years to vet one single teacher accused of a sexual crime!
2. We have visited the Western Cape #SafeSchools call centre and are calling on all eight ANC provinces to roll out a similar call centre in each province to provide help to learners and parents in dangerous situations.
3. We have met with the police, for example, in Eldorado Park calling for greater action on drugs in schools. Gangs and drugs have to be eradicated from schools. The police told us that in Eldorado Park there isn’t one single drug free street in existence.
4. We have launched our safe schools petition (https://protectourchildren.co.za/) and called on the public to sign our letter to President Ramaphosa to call for action to protect our learners such as eradicating pit toilets that children fall into.
5. We have asked for a meeting with the Director-General of Social Development to investigate and pressure the department into partnering with basic education to vet and remove teachers named on the Child Protection Register.
6. Now today, we are calling on Cabinet to cease and desist from budget cuts to schools in South Africa as well as the nine provincial cabinets.
7. We have amended DA policy to call for computers and the internet to be delivered systematically to every school in South Africa for teaching and learning purposes together with training for teachers in how to facilitate online learning and security so that the computers don’t get stolen.
8. The DA has submitted our application to the Essential Services committee to have certain positions in schools declared an essential service

But I guess none of this will happen while the ANC and their bedfellows, the EFF, cut the education budget even further to try and fulfil their populist promises.