(IRIN) – Ethembeni Enrichment Centre, a school in a run-down part of Port Elizabeth, the largest city in Eastern Cape, South Africa’s poorest province, has achieved a remarkable 100 percent pass rate for a dozen years. But officials from the education department, sent on a fact-finding mission to learn from the school’s success, are running more than two hours late. Irritation is discernible in the voice of school principal Elbe Malherbe – punctuality is one of the few rules that must be abided by teachers and pupils alike. “When … [it's time to] start, you start,” Malherbe told IRIN in clipped replies during a telephone interview. Then, in a sudden change of tone, she said: “I wish you could see through the phone what I am seeing.” It is the first day of applications for the 2011 school year and a woman in traditional Xhosa attire is filling out a form for her child. Ethembeni only accepts pupils whose mother tongue is Xhosa, which generally translates into poor and black. The annual school fees are R3,800 (US$506), excluding stationery. Many poor parents make sacrifices to keep their children in school, but Malherbe believes in affordable – not free – education, because it is an “investment by pupils, parents and teachers [that] everyone must buy into”. The language of instruction is English. Apart from not brooking tardiness, the school’s other non-negotiables are that class attendance is compulsory, home work must be completed, pupils must clean the classrooms and grounds every day, and parents must be involved in their child’s education. “The classrooms were barely furnished. The driveway to the school was a rocky, narrow passage … The school hall was packed with a few hundred eager faces, the children virtually sitting on top of one another on the floor … I saw struggle, hunger and poverty etched into each child’s countenance,” educationist and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, Jonathan Jansen, recounted after a recent visit. “For any child to pass under these difficult circumstances, it would take a miracle,” he wrote. Yet nearly two-thirds of the 70 pupils in Ethembeni’s 2009 matric, or final year, class achieved a university-entrance pass, while other financially comparable schools hung on at the bottom of the academic achievement ladder. We’re not Einsteins here – we teach. It’s nice to be part of a winning team. With nothing, you can still be successful if the heart is right and the spirit is right The school has no library, no science laboratory, although there is a computer that gives the 400 pupils internet access. The government pays for 11 of the 17 teachers; the salary shortfall of the six other teachers has to come out of the school fees. The compactness of the school is part of its success. “In schools of a thousand [students], how can you know all the parents? If I have a problem with a child, or they have not done their homework, I phone their parents and they are here in five minutes,” Malherbe said. “We’re not Einsteins here – we teach. It’s nice to be part of a winning team. With nothing, you can still be successful if the heart is right and the spirit is right.” Ethembeni, which means “place of hope”, swims against the prevailing national current in education, where standards have been steadily declining – in contrast to school fees. More money, less education The government’s answer to the malaise is to throw more money into the education system; in the 2010/11 financial year it budgeted R165 billion (US$8.6 billion) for the sector, a 17 percent above inflation increase from the previous year. The matric, or final high school exam, is used as a benchmark for the state of education in South Africa. Of the 550,227 pupils who wrote their final examinations in 2009, 61 percent passed, and 19.9 percent of those achieved the required marks to qualify for tertiary education. Marius Roodt, an education analyst at the South African Institute of Race Relations, a policy and research organization, told IRIN the current teaching standard was akin to Bantu education – the system imposed by apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who said blacks should only be educated to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. In 2004 the pass rate was 71 percent, and it has been on a steady downward trend since then “It is very unlikely that there will be an increase in matric pass rates. In 2004 the pass rate was 71 percent, and it has been on a steady downward trend since then, with each year reflecting a decrease. This is a trend that is likely to continue into the future, at least in terms of the quality of the qualification,” Roodt said. He attributed the decline to the political influence of the 240,000-member South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), the country’s largest teacher union and an affiliate of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which is an alliance partner of the ruling African National Congress. “An example was when the union encouraged members to campaign for President Jacob Zuma prior to last year’s general election, instead of teaching,” he said. “Although teachers should be allowed to be unionized – like any profession in any democracy – the influence of SADTU is malignant and not benign. It is possible that SADTU has the interest of only its members at heart, and not that of the pupils in South Africa’s schools,” Roodt commented. “The reintroduction of the ’school inspectors’ system, which would greatly improve the quality of the country’s teaching, has been resisted by SADTU for some time. The union has also opposed systems to monitor teacher performance,” he said. School inspectors Zuma announced in his 2010 State of the Nation address that a system of oversight would be instituted to monitor schools and ensure that teachers were in class to teach. SADTU spokesperson Nomusa Cembi told IRIN that the union objected to the reintroduction of school inspectors, and did “not know where the president got the information that teachers are only in class for three hours, or so, a day.” Photo: IRIN Pupils at a Cape Town primary school Zuma first made the claim in a speech to school principals in KwaZulu-Natal Province, who gathered at the Durban International Convention Centre in August 2009. “We need to confront certain realities. For example, teachers in former whites-only schools teach in class for an average of 6.5 hours a day, while teachers in schools in disadvantaged communities teach for around 3.5 hours a day. The result is that the outcomes are unequal.” A recent survey published by Tokiso, an independent labour dispute resolution body, found that the teachers’ union was responsible for 42 percent of all work days lost through industrial action between 1995 and 2009. Cembi said this gave the impression that SADTU members “strike at the drop of a hat”. Tanya Venter, CEO of Tokiso, told a local newspaper, Business Day, that SADTU’s participation in the 2007 public sector strike was the main reason for the union recording such a high rate of absenteeism. A recent World Bank working paper: No More Cutting Class? Reducing Teacher Absence and Providing Incentives for Performance, found “each additional 5 percent increase in teacher absence reduces learning by 4 to 8 percent of a year’s learning for the typical student.” Cembi said responsibility for the deterioration of education should be shared among learners, teachers, the education department and the government. She was unable to provide any data on whether or not a SADTU teacher had ever been dismissed for poor performance. Zimbabwe’s loss, South Africa’s gain Government has been widely blamed for creating a critical shortage of teachers trained in science and mathematics after it closed teacher training colleges in 2000 and put the onus on universities to produce educators. The government is now considering re-opening the teacher training colleges. We are eager to recruit more foreign teachers because of the shortages One solution has been to recruit teachers from Zimbabwe. Dickson Masemola, head of education in Limpopo Province, which borders Zimbabwe, said his department had hired 600 Zimbabwean educators to teach maths, science and commercial subjects, resulting in a turnaround in academic performance. Mbali Thusi, a spokesman for the education department of KwaZulu-Natal, said a number of foreign teachers, especially in maths and science, were working in the province, and more would be hired because of the shortage of qualified teachers in these fields. “The problem is more severe in rural schools – most maths and science teachers prefer to work in urban areas,” Thusi said. “But we are eager to recruit more foreign teachers because of the shortages … We have sent requesting documents to the national department to give us a go-ahead. We want to recruit hundreds of these teachers to plug the holes in our system.” The head of the KwaZulu-Natal School Governing Bodies Association, Reginald Cheliza, told IRIN: “We would like our children to succeed in school, but it is clear that this is not happening. Some of the problems start at school level, others at provincial or even national level.”

IRIN – Free primary school education got off to a rocky start in Swaziland this week, five years after a new constitution mandated that the government foot the bill for the first few years of a child’s education.

The opening week was characterised by a lack of teachers, overcrowded classrooms and confusion about the payment of school fees. “To say this week’s schools opening was a disaster would be an understatement,” an independent newspaper, The Times of Swaziland, said in an editorial, noting that the warning signs of unpreparedness had been apparent for months.

Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini acknowledged “teething problems”, and said efforts were underway to build more classrooms, provide learning materials and boost staff levels. “Newly recruited teachers may not reach the number we need, but we are already in the process of recruiting more,” he said.

Read more – http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=87922

IPS – The Beijing Platform for Action in 1995 set out an agenda to address gender equality in priority areas, including poverty, education, and health care. It also committed governments to address violence against women, equitable access to economic resources and decision-making power.

“Overall, there has been progress made, but we are not yet there,” said U.N. Under-Secretary General Dr Abdoulie Janneh at the opening of a regional review of progress implementing the Beijing plan.

Read more – http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=49364

Globally, 10.3 million teachers − 1.3 million teachers each year − need to be recruited over eight years (2007-2015) just to provide universal primary education by 2015, according to new figures released by UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics on World Teachers’ Day, celebrated on 5 October. 

This year, World Teachers’ Day puts the spotlight on the global teacher shortage and the challenge of increasing the teaching force and its capacity to provide quality education, at a time when the financial and economic crisis is placing increasing strain on education budgets.

“Many countries are making tremendous efforts to meet educational goals,” said Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO. “But they will not make it without recruiting and training many more teachers. We cannot let the financial and economic crisis cut into education budgets. Lower spending on education will have dramatic short and long-term consequences on the quality of education.”

“This is a crucial period to keep our pledges,” he continued. “I am deeply concerned about the 22% drop in aid to basic education observed between 2006 and 2007. Further cuts in aid could seriously threaten progress made since 2000 in many low income countries, especially in Africa, where the teacher shortage is the most acute.”

Twenty-six out of 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa face a critical teacher gap, according to new projections from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. In these countries, 2.6 million teachers were in the classrooms in 2007. This number must grow to 3.7 million in just eight years to meet the UPE goal by 2015. This means that for every two teachers teaching in 2007 in the region, there must be three in 2015. The Central African Republic, for example, would have to expand its teaching forces by 18.5% each year in order to ensure that there are enough teachers in the classroom by 2015. Teacher gaps are also severe in Eritrea (15.9%), followed by Chad (13.8%), Niger (12.5%), and Burkina Faso (12.0%).

Read more – http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=46543&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Only seven years now remain before the 2015 deadline by which world leaders have pledged to reduce hunger and extreme poverty by half and to make substantial gains in education, health, social equity, environmental sustainability and international solidarity. 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. 2. Achieve universal primary education. 3. Promote gender equality and empower women. 4. Reduce child mortality. 5. Improve maternal health. 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. 7. Ensure environmental sustainability. 8. Develop a global partnership for development.