[ Home ] [ Speeches & statements ]

1 November 2007

"The importance of public-private community partnerships in education"

Bitou 10 community leaders, particularly the Mayor, Deputy Mayor and councillors
Founder funders
Founder schools, principals, and managers
Teachers and pupils
Officials from my department and from the WCED
Educators and learners

Thank you for inviting me to the launch of the Bitou 10 Education and Development Foundation. There are a number of impressive innovations in the Bitou 10 school improvement intervention and I have been impressed in what I have seen today. The project has features that are found in many education projects in South Africa.

First, if we improve the physical conditions of schools, and if we improve the equipment required for teaching and learning, then learner attainment will improve.

Second, if we support school management teams in obtaining the necessary financial and administration skills, systems and procedures to run the school and the curriculum effectively and efficiently, we will make schools more accountable and sustainable. In turn, this will lead to sustainable, learner attainment at a high level. Third, the involvement of parents, educators and the broad community is vital for the success of local schools.

I want to stress two observations this evening. The first is to do with the importance of early reading and the second is to emphasise the importance of embedding public-private partnerships securely in communities.

The first point is about early reading

The difference between the learner attainment of advantaged and disadvantaged children becomes apparent very early on in life. There are many studies that show this, that measure attainment in terms of years ahead and years behind. But these studies also show that early reading makes a difference. Encouraging parents to read to their children in those vital early years can make a huge difference to later academic success. We must encourage parents to read to their children, but to achieve this we must also ensure that we eradicate adult illiteracy in our country.

The most striking thing about Bitou 10 is the success you have had with early reading.The Joint Education Trust (JET) evaluated the project in 2003 and 2007. JET's Nick Taylor says there has been a huge improvement in reading skills at Grade 3. In fact, he says he has never seen such an improvement anywhere else in the country.

I quote: "Indeed, in 20 years of evaluating programmes of this kind, the author has never seen gains of this magnitude". He credits the huge improvement to the teaching of reading by Marlene Rousseau and Beulah Foley. Earlier today, Marlene explained to us how she does this. I would like to endorse key elements of the "model" she uses.

First, children need to read early and often, but with a focus on reading for meaning. Here stories are critical, all kinds of stories, stories from teachers, stories from children, and stories from books. Second, writing is the key to the development of literacy. Children write about what they read. You cannot have the one without the other, reading without writing. Children are encouraged to write from grade 1.

Last, changing teachers' reading practices takes time. As Marlene told us earlier, she has been working at Wittedrif Primêr since 2004 and in The Crags and Phakamisani since 2005. To begin with, Marlene spent six weeks at the school in classrooms. Afterwards she visited the schools for days at a time over the next two or three years to date.

As Marlene says, it is these on-site demonstrations that provide a far more effective training method than workshops. In workshops, teachers are told what to do, without being shown how to do it.

This year we began the "Drop all and Read" campaign that encourages principals to set aside a specific reading period at school. This was an important intervention, but one that we soon discovered had a limited impact without a specialist like Marlene to teach teachers to teach children how to read.

The department has just completed the development of an Early-Grade Reading Assessment instrument which is being piloted in selected districts in Sepedi, Xitsonga, Tshivenda, isiXhosa, isiZulu and English to help teachers monitor reading progress in their classrooms, and to help us keep an eye on how all our schools are doing.

This emphasises the crucial importance we attach to early learning in our policy and practice. The second point I want to make is about the importance of community-based public-private education partnerships. I am delighted to witness the success of a partnership between the education and private sectors, between the ten founder schools and the founder funders, led by Cadbury South Africa and the DG Murray Trust which has always had a particular interest in and generosity to education.

I would like to thank the partners in this project for their investment in the development of the Bitou 10 schools. The Bitou 10 has begun to overcome the inequalities of the past. They have begun to put into place those essential building blocks of a good school. They have begun to emphasise the importance of good leadership and good school management. They have begun to focus on generating the commitment of the teachers, and they have begun to work on building good discipline.

What this intervention has shown is that the transformation of under-performing schools is possible with the right mix of government resources, with the right mix of private resources, and with that essential ingredient, parental involvement.

The role of the private sector in the education system cannot be over-emphasised. One of the goals that we have set ourselves in the second decade of our freedom is to ensure that we consolidate and strengthen our education system by focussing on the quality of learning and teaching that takes place in our schools. The improvement of the quality of education requires an injection of new resources.

From the side of government, we have initiated a quality improvement, development, support and upliftment programme (QIDS-UP) to allocate new learning resources to schools in all of our poorest and most disadvantaged communities. However, given the backlogs that our NEIMS survey has revealed, it is clear that government cannot overcome the legacy of educational inequality alone. The role and participation of the private sector and private citizens is critical to the success of our quest to provide resources to our schools. Public-private partnerships like the Bitou 10 Foundation, which is launched tonight, are vital in reaching out to our communities.

It is also clear that such partnerships also transcend the provision of financial resources and involve intellectual partnerships and the transfer of skills, I think of the role of your specialist service providers. It is also important that partnerships are sustainable, if they are to make any meaningful impact.

It is with a community-embedded public-private partnership like Bitou 10 that we will be able to turn our schools into community hubs. Schools are more than a place of learning and teaching. Our schools need to become centres of community life.

When they do, then communities have taken "ownership" of their schools. I was saddened at one school that I visited today to see the iron bars protecting a computer laboratory. This does not reflect community ownership.

I understand the process that the Bitou project has gone through to negotiate communities taking "ownership" of these schools; the mayor's education indaba could be copied in many other communities throughout the country.

And the memorandum of understanding that will bind the founding funders, the founding schools and the communities is a model that other communities in our country could explore.

I congratulate the Western Cape Education Department for taking such an interest in the project and EMDC Director, Bonnie Sesenyamotse, for pioneering the memorandum.

I also congratulate Cadbury and the DG Murray Trust for pioneering this initiative seven years ago. My sincere thanks to Mr Ractcliffe and the team he has drawn on for this vital initiative. I conclude by thanking all those who have played a role in the development of the Bitou 10 Foundation.

Thank you.

Issued by: Department of Education
1 November 2007
Source: Department of Education (http://www.education.gov.za)