Gauteng Premier David Makhura is a good leader.
Since becoming a premier, Makhura has been – and still is – making the right noises, with the right tone. He also has grand ideas on how to overcome challenges facing the province. Whether those ideas will become a reality is another issue.
In his State of the Province Address, Premier Makhura said the Gauteng province will focus on education, foundation phase specifically. The province also is planning to build more schools for the children with special needs. That’s good news.
I know the challenge faced by families that have children with special needs. My late sister had Down syndrome. When she was young, there were no schools around the area that catered for children like her. It was a struggle for the family. I’m glad that the provincial government is planning to build more schools for such kids.
More often than not, the focus is on pupils in high school, matriculants in particular – foundation phase is ignored. It’s a relief that the Gauteng province is planning to pay equal attention to the foundation phase. In fact, it’s a step in the right direction.
Are pupils in the foundation phase given a good foundation? The introduction of ANA was an attempt to answer the above question. But Sadtu and other unions are concerned that ANA is not being implemented by the basic education department the way it should. Hence the department of education and unions are at odds regarding ANA.
That said, Gauteng province is facing the challenge of urbanisation, which is happening at a fast rate. Urbanisation results in overcrowding in our schools. My concern is that government is not addressing this issue.
For instance, in my son’s class (Grade 4) they are 41. In my daughter’s class (Grade 1) they are 45. Overcrowding has resulted in teachers being over-burdened. To make things easy for themselves, teachers focus on bright students. Average and slow pupils suffer in the process.
Educators also are pushing the burden to parents by giving pupils too much homework and projects. Parents are forced to assume the role of pupils and do homework for their kids. Imagine if you have three school-going kids. That means you have to do homework for three kids.
Some of the work given to pupils are above their heads. Sometimes even parents struggle to help kids because the work is difficult. It’s worse in cases where parents are not literate or busy. This affects the quality of education.
I didn’t hear the premier addressing overcrowding at our schools. We need more schools and the government is not building any. So that means overcrowding is here to stay. How’s that helping improve quality of education? It affects education negatively.
Something needs to be done to address this challenge.
