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29 September 2004

Programme Director
Board of Directors of JET Education Services
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen

It is encouraging to have the opportunity to be part of this annual report meeting of the Joint Education Trust. I want to start by congratulating the JET board of directors and all those involved in its various operations for keeping JET true to its founding and original vision.

One of JET’s largest areas of work has been school development. At the present time the organisation is either the lead agent or a senior partner in the management of school development programmes affecting a total of some 3,000 schools spread across all 9 provinces, and funded variously by the South African Business Trust, Britain’s Department for International Development, the Swedish International Development Agency, and USAID. Immediate past clients include the Danish International Development Agency and the Royal Netherlands Embassy.

I have had a long association with JET, beginning even before 1997 when I became a member of JET’s board of trustees, and so I understand the significance of this meeting. The genesis of JET in the early 1990s was a groundbreaking initiative by the non-governmental sector and it has made an enormous contribution to generating attention to informed innovation and quality performance in education. This is an unusual characteristic for an organisation that came into being under the cloud of apartheid. Few organisations in the early 1990s paid attention to issues of quality research, performance criteria for ngos and the development of responsive and implementable solutions in education.

New members of government are often faced with a large number of kind advisers when they take office, they tend to seek informed data as a way of checking their intuitive responses, and JET has been able to provide such data and evidence for more than a decade.

One of the peculiar features of our fairly developed education system is that we lack analyses of quality. Generally, we believe the privileged schools are doing well qualitatively and that the poor schools are doing badly. There is very little research on what young people are learning at different points of the system and its quality. There is no description of what quality learning means. JET has the potential to make a significant contribution in this regard as it is one of the few organisations that has developed the ability to execute systemic reviews and analyses of education.

Over the years of its operations the organisation has worked with schools, NGOs, higher education, trade unions, government and business. Thus, apart from reflecting on the short-term achievements of one year, we have reason to cast a long look back at where JET has come from. We have reason to celebrate the committed spirit demonstrated by the business and non-governmental community when they realised that the challenges of transforming our society were too huge to be left to government alone.

All of you are well aware that despite the positive achievements of JET, in partnership with many others; there are still significant struggles for change to be waged in education. Among the more intractable we face are the inequalities in the school sector which are reflected in the present acute mismatch of appropriate skills generally and in specific sectors of our economy in particular.

We are also faced with the challenge of narrowing the yawning chasm between urban and rural access to quality education. Aggressive initiatives are afoot to ensure that all learners, regardless of where they are located, are not denied the basic right to a quality education.

Recently there have been a number of studies, all of which point to unacceptably low levels of literacy and numeracy among our pupils.

Fortunately with the help of organisations such as this one we are now able to assess learners in new ways and thus establish scientifically generated and reliable information on the types and levels of national competencies. Such information is assisting us in benchmarking our performance and in monitoring and tracking progression towards the nationally set outcomes.

It would of course, be immensely worrying if disproportionate attention were paid to assessment rather than to making significant and responsive interventions. Assessment is a means to an end, and that end should be ensuring that our schooling sector equips young people with skills, knowledge, and values that stand them in good stead as responsible and productive citizens.

JET has been in the forefront in the field of assessment. This activity has not only been an important element of JET’s work in school development, but it has also contributed significantly to the national debates and practices around the sometimes controversial issue of large-scale testing as a diagnostic tool for school performance.

JET’s literacy and numeracy tests at grade 3 and 6 levels were developed in 1999 in order to have standardised instruments to use in the schools participating in school-development programmes. The tests are used to establish the levels at which children are performing, so that appropriate intervention programmes can be devised, and to measure progress in improving learning, as each project evolves over time.

There has been a great demand for these tests, and JET still receives commissions to deploy them on behalf of school development projects. To date they have been used in over 900 schools with more than 40 000 children in all provinces.

The JET tests were developed in parallel to the systemic evaluation initiative of the Department of Education, a programme that tests a national sample of children every 3 years in grades 3 and 6. The two initiatives respectively serve different ends. While the JET tests give detailed diagnostic information down to the school level, the systemic evaluation exercise gives a broad overview of the state of learner performance at the national and provincial levels.

On the strength of its experience in the field of assessment, in 2002 and 2003 JET won the tenders to develop literacy and numeracy tests at grade 3 and 6 levels for use in all primary schools in the Western Cape.

When the results of the WCED grade 6 testing programme were released, there was a furious public debate. I remember referring to the results in my first budget speech. I was disturbed by the poor state of learning revealed by the results, but I also began to ask questions as to what these results meant in relation to those of the systemic evaluation initiative. My concern is that it is confusing to have different testing programmes in operation at the same time producing results that are difficult to compare usefully.

As a result of my concern, discussions were held between the DOE and JET. The outcome of these meetings is that the two parties are now working together to develop a new set of JET tests, which will incorporate the double diagnostic dimension of the WCED tests, and incorporate elements of the DOEs systemic evaluation instruments.

This is a particularly exciting development for two reasons. First, it will enable the new JET tests and the systemic evaluation tests to ‘speak to’ each other: we will be able to tell what a score of x% on the JET test will mean in terms of performance on the Systemic Evaluation test.

Second, the sharing of expertise between the state and civil society will produce instruments that are better than either party may have achieved on its own.

The new tests will be deployed in 750 schools in the USAID-funded Integrated Education Programme in February 2005. At the same time the DFID-funded Khanyisa programme, working in 1000 schools in Limpopo, has also commissioned JET to administer the tests in its schools. In addition, the Eastern Cape Dept of Education is considering administering the new tests in the province early in 2005.

Thus, the partnership in the field of learner assessment between JET, the national DOE, and a number of provincial departments is building up a detailed picture of the state of learning in our schools. This has the potential to be an important instrument in devising measures directed at improving the quality of schooling for all South African children.

Our ten years of democracy and transformation fall within a period in which the international community has committed itself not only to expanding participation rates in education by 2015, but also to ensuring that the outcomes of educational quality are measurable and of a high quality. While healthy and robust debates must be encouraged on what characterises “high quality” education, we have to accept that there are basic conditions that must be created to facilitate effective teaching and meaningful learning in our schools.

Our efforts to turn the situation around are not only undermined by the size of the infrastructural backlogs left by apartheid, but rising demands created by unpredictable population movements and overwhelming changes in human settlement patterns also add to the complexity. The challenges of appropriate planning and provisioning are huge. Nonetheless, all of us collectively as South Africans must rise to the challenge.

Our children deserve the best in terms of resources.

Of course, it would be naïve to assume that sufficient levels of material resources alone would be enough to realise the positive outcomes to which we aspire. Equally critical are adequate levels of competent and motivated personnel in our schools. It is not surprising that all the studies conducted at school place the blame for dysfunctional institutions on inadequate managerial skills and ineffectual discharge of professional duties. JET’s own projects in schools and districts over the past couple of years bear witness to this fact.

It is heartening to see that, where appropriate interventions and support were provided, the gains were phenomenal and the situation could be turned around completely. Indeed, many a pilot project has shown that where managers (at school and district levels) set clear measures of accountability and monitored these accordingly and teachers received relevant support, school results improved.

We have noted in the last few years an overwhelming increase in the number of projects that are targeting improvement of reading and writing skills among learners in the general education and training (GET) band. The willingness of schools, communities and NGOs to participate in these projects is clearly a demonstration of the readiness of these stakeholders to create and seize opportunities for transformation.

One of the ways is to establish links and partnerships with relevant stakeholders in order to strengthen our ability to effectively act on the promise of providing quality education to all. The benefits of partnerships are countless. Every system needs objective assessors who have the intellectual ability to provide quality reviews and findings.

Most of the evidence of outstanding successes has so far been collected from medium- to small-scale initiatives. But the lessons learnt are extremely valuable.

In closing, it is useful to refer to a few ongoing challenges that we face.

Despite our commitment to provide enough teachers and classrooms, the problem of large classes seems set to be with us for some time. This is so, largely because of the complex issues of planning human resources and infrastructure that come with the unpredictable human movements to which I alluded to earlier in my address. How do we then, in a proactive way, equip our teachers with skills to handle large classes efficiently and confidently without compromising the quality of curriculum delivery?

Another problem that keeps re- emerging in all the assessments that are reported in our schools is the limiting effect that the language of teaching and learning places on achievement. Again this problem tends to be more serious in rural than in urban schools. What part of this problem can be ascribed to the effectiveness of the various languages as tools of curriculum delivery, and how much of the blame can be put on the quality of training that the current crop of teachers have received? What needs to be done to ensure that the language barrier to quality learning is reduced?

It may seem inappropriate to end with questions rather than answers, but I want to emphasise that, ten years into our democracy, we must celebrate the gains we have made at the same time as we think about confronting the challenges that remain. I am convinced that partnerships will provide meaningful responses to many of our challenges.

Thank you.

Issued by: Ministry of Education
29 September 2004