An education summit has been called to resolve challenges inhibiting quality teaching and learning in Alexandra.
This was announced by the Joburg East District director of education, Myamezeli Ndevu at an education stakeholders’ meeting at Sankopano Community Centre.
Ndevu called for the summit to address the current challenges in education, and as a platform to plan for next year and beyond. This as the current matrics write their preliminary examinations in less than a month.
“With this limited time before the final year examinations starting in October, pupils may not be ready to improve on last year’s performance,” said Ndevu. This he said in reference to the midyear results of the school-based assessments of Eastbank, Minerva and Realogile high schools. The three are some of the schools receiving funds from the multi-million rand schools’ improvement support programme. Ndevu said the three schools had shown no major improvement, especially in maths literacy where 60 percent of the students failed.
He said this reflected parents’ lack of interest in taking part in improving the education of their children.
“We tend not to praise children who excel and make them role models to inspire others, and [because of this] we produce more criminals than academics who are essential to society,” he said.
“This is costly to the country when it’s forced to incur huge amounts [of money] maintaining youths in prison, instead of spending the money to support them through bursaries for higher education.”
Ndevu also blamed school governing bodies in general, whose members, he alleged, only promoted their self-interest by recruiting incompetent teachers who were indebted to them through kickbacks from school projects.
He also castigated some teachers who, he claimed, took advantage of laxity in schools by spending more time in staff rooms than in classrooms, were late to school and to class, and also called on union’s to defend them for their misdemeanours.
