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27 October 2007

Vuyo Mbuli, CEO of Zazise Communications
Principals and teachers
Ladies and gentlemen

It gives me great pleasure to be with you today.

Thank you for inviting me to address you.

This workshop offers principals an important opportunity to discuss policy and implementation in education and to share best practice solutions. It is also an opportunity for the Ministry to alert principals to the important role they play in ensuring South Africa achieves its core objectives.

The South African Education Department sent a delegation to the biannual United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) general conference in Paris. The conference is a gathering of the Ministers of Education of all the United Nations Member States. It deliberates on the education, cultural and scientific mandates of Unesco and debates world progress in acting on the United Nations (UN) resolutions and the education rights in various international conventions.

One of the key discussions at each general conference is world progress on the Education for All (EFA) goals that were agreed at Dakar in 2000. Linked to these are the education and science goals of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to Unesco data, in 2001 only 65% of South African children reached Grade 5, and we seem to be in danger of not meeting the universal primary education goal of EFA.

Only two countries in sub Saharan Africa seem likely to meet the Poverty and Environment Program (UPE) goals, Lesotho, Mauritius, and three countries have achieved full UPE, Sao Tome, Cape Verde, Seychelles.

South Africa needs to intensify efforts at ensuring that all children who should be in school are in school.

Unesco points to two main reasons for sub-Saharan Africa lagging behind the rest of the world in reaching the target for universal primary education: teacher shortages, resulting in overcrowded classrooms, with primary pupil or teacher ratios up to 70:1 in some countries, including Chad, Congo and Mozambique, and low levels of teacher qualification and training.

The EFA Global Monitoring Report for 2005 pointed out that "a poor mastery of the curriculum, rigid teaching practices, lack of textbooks and other teaching materials, as well as insufficient instructional time, vital for better learning" were also a cause for concern. As you are aware we have been devising strategies to address these challenges and we encourage all principals to assist us.

We also regularly review our progress.

For example, the Community Survey released this week pointed to significant improvements in the education sector in comparison to 2001, and our National Education Infrastructure Management Structure (NEIMS) report has also shown how far we have come with improvements in the infrastructure of schools over the past ten years. But both the survey and the report show that there is still very much more to do.

What implications do these findings have for school leadership and management?

The South African Schools Act, 1996, says nothing about principals.

The core purpose of principalship is to provide leadership and management in all areas of the school, to enable the creation and support of conditions under which high quality teaching and learning takes place and which promotes the highest possible standards of learner achievement.

Part of our continuing difficulties in providing quality education in all our schools is because focus has largely been on governance and not on school leadership.

Following the end of apartheid policy, focus was on democratisation and perhaps not sufficiently on democratisation and professional imperatives of quality learning and teaching. The focus on democratisation has had some unintended consequences, many of which bedevil our system to-day.

We were correct to focus on democratising, but should also accept that the fabric of the system was so damaged that a higher integration of ethics and democracy was essential as would much more dedicated attention to resource provision and teacher development.

We created powerful school governing bodies as our instrument for "taking the nation to school."

The intention of the policy was to link school and community and to give life to the principles of change and transformation that are the heart of our constitution and our new laws.

Despite the success of many school governing bodies, quality teaching and learning remains elusive in many of our schools.

It has become clear to all that both leadership and management and teaching need to be strengthened, if we are to improve the learning performance of our children.

That is the purpose of one part in the Education Laws Amendment Bill.

The Bill gives attention to school leadership and to the key role of the principal in the promotion of quality learning and teaching.

In defining the responsibilities of principals, I think we have made it clear that the principal is in charge of improving learner attainment.

As leaders, you set the targets for your school.

As managers, you make sure that the targets are achieved.

As leaders, you make strategic plans.

As managers, you design and oversee the way those plans are carried out.

As leaders, you motivate and inspire.

As managers, you use your influence and authority to get people to work productively.

Leadership and management are about getting things done. Both are about organising and coordinating so that what needs to happen does happen.

One of the critical roles played by our principals is to ensure that the curriculum is properly taught.

Too few principals are on top of the curriculum.

For this reason, the department is in the process of initiating a dedicated training programme, to commence in 2008, for all school principals and managers on the effective implementation, management, and support of the curriculum.

Through this programme, schools will be able to impart the knowledge and skills needed by our learners in an improved manner. This and other related initiatives should assist our schools in ensuring that our learners are better equipped for the world of work.

At the present moment, there is no formal requirement for principals to be trained as managers.

They are often appointed on the basis of a successful record as teachers.

Most of them attend short, in-service workshops that are sometimes not properly organised and do not address their specific needs.

The Department of Education has initiated and is driving the development of professional requirements for school principals, which includes an Advanced Certificate in Education: School Leadership (ACE: SL) programme.

The programme is a two-year part-time course. The candidates for the ACE: SL, which is in its pilot phase, is fully funded by the department. A bursary worth R12 000 per year is made available for each candidate.

The ACE: SL is fundamentally different from other programmes on offer.

The ACE is national, it is values driven, and it has been developed collaboratively with the involvement of 16 different higher education institutions of our country.

Further, it is a practice-based programme to be implemented as a workplace-based programme, which will be assessed at site level, with support to the participants by a system of mentoring and through fostering learning networks based on the establishment of district and local clusters.

In conclusion, I appointed a Ministerial Commission a couple of months ago to report on what makes good schools succeed. The Commission is about to report. However, on the plane home, I read an article in the Economist on the McKinsey report, which is on a similar theme. It begins by making the point that increased investment appears to have little impact on learner achievement. I quote: "Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing, no matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge, see chart. To misquote Woody Allen, those who cannot do, teach; those who cannot teach, run the schools."

Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.

Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries. Schools need to do three things, says the McKinsey report: get the best teachers, take the top third of your graduates, get the best out of teachers, and step in when pupils start to lag behind. It is not rocket science. We have the policies in place. And we are beginning to focus our attention closely on getting the best out of our schools.

You may wonder why the greater part of a speech to principals focussed on teaching and learning. The reason lies in the fact that South Africa continues to lag behind many countries in learning outcomes. Given the core purpose of schools, learning and teaching, I think it is correct for all of us to give far greater attention to the success of our schools in ensuring children can read, write and count.

Issued by: Department of Education
27 October 2007