Commitment as important as resources say teachers

With two months to go before the start of South Africa’s school-leaving matric examinations, education authority tests show widespread failures in mathematics, physical science and biology. The tests were written at schools that had under 50 percent passes in last year’s exams.

Department officials in the province of KwaZulu-Natal told IRIN that despite intervention programmes, the combined effect of poor resourcing, under-qualified and under-motivated teachers and underprivileged students for many of whom English is a foreign language, result in low pass rates.

Education accounts for the highest proportion of social services spending in South Africa. However, the historical legacy of under-funding means deep structural inequalities. In 1994 black schools received only about one-fifth of state funding enjoyed by white schools.

Severe deficiencies also remain in both the quality and distribution of teachers. Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, stated at a KwaZulu-Natal provincial teacher’s conference recently that teacher professionalism is currently at an all-time low, and that South African taxpayers have little confidence in the South Africa Democratic Teacher’s Union (SADTU), the largest union in South Africa. “At the moment,” Asmal told an audience of union members, “I do not believe the public out there believes you are really worth the money we spend on you. They have reasons for that. Let us together get rid of those reasons.”
The impact of these differences are felt most in rural areas where crumbling school buildings and overcrowded classes are common. But some rural schools are bucking trends and producing startling matric results with few resources. One of them is Myeka Secondary School, which lies at the end of a 30 km dirt road in Inanda, outside Durban.

At first glance, it looks like hundreds of other rural schools in South Africa. Children wearing makeshift uniforms play in the dusty yard surrounded by drab, barrack-like classroom blocks. The school serves a community still struggling for basic services. There’s no grid electricity here, and only intermittent supplies of fresh water.

But a closer look reveals an institution that against the odds is producing consistently high matric results. The school even has it’s own computer centre, powered by solar electricity - connected to the internet via a cellphone. “We’ve had huge problems here, but in the end it comes down to our great teachers,” Melusi Zwane, principal of Myeka school, told IRIN.

Zwane is part of a growing group of educators in South Africa who believe that committed teaching staff with a shared vision can surmount many of the obstacles in the way of academic success. Bongi Peyana is principal of a school in the impoverished Eastern Cape that had an appalling 3.3 percent matric pass rate in 1997. Last year, 93 percent of his pupils at Sandi Secondary School near Umtata passed the exam. He told IRIN that stunned provincial education officials could not understand how he had managed to turn the school around in just three years. “It was easy, I got rid of the loafers and cruisers and gathered around me a group of very motivated people,” he said.

Sandi Secondary School has no water, no electricity and hardly any equipment. “Teaching science is very difficult, we improvise, we make our own equipment for the laboratory from household things,” said Peyana. He emphasised that without the dedication and enthusiasm of Les Mkhonza, the physics and chemistry teacher, success in these subjects would have been impossible. “I’ve got a passion for this science and it rubs off on the kids, also I try and make it relevant to their lives somehow,” Mkhonza told IRIN.

Peyana’s school is fortunate, recruiting maths and science teachers is a general problem in South Africa, attracting them to rural schools with inferior accommodation and resources can be near impossible.

Amambisi Secondary School in the Eastern Cape is far from the nearest road: during the rainy season pupils have to ford a river to get to class. Yet thanks to former president Nelson Mandela it’s one of the best equipped rural schools in the province. His policy of bringing private money to bear on rural poverty means Amambisi boasts new classrooms and a science laboratory that would be the envy of wealthier urban schools.

Despite the school having all the trappings of success, principal Zweli Njomi is pessimistic. “We simply cannot get the teachers we need, we have just re-advertised posts for a maths and a science teacher, nobody applied, we need government to provide incentives for teachers to come to rural schools,” he told IRIN. But Michael Khan, a policy adviser to Kader Asmal, said that the real problem is the unavailability of teaching posts. “Qualified teachers are coming out of colleges, but there are not enough resources to employ them,” he told IRIN.

Although experts agree that quality teachers make all the difference, they told IRIN that other factors were also important. “It’s difficult to pinpoint why certain schools do well, but it’s not just good teachers, there has to be good management of things like budgets and staff as well as planning and conflict resolution skills,” Jenny Coulsen of the Durban-based Education Policy Unit explained.

Others in the field said that the mysterious “X-factor” that made a school special was as much about community involvement as good teachers. “Getting the community to support the school in real, practical ways is crucial to progress,” Adele Gordon of the Rural Education Programme (REP), a Cape Town based NGO told IRIN.

Zwane agrees that a dedicated teaching staff is only part of the winning formula. “You need strong support from the community, look around, this area is poor, yet we have had not one theft in two years from the school and we have many computers,” he said. The school has been innovative in building a positive relationship with parents and other local people. It offers free adult education and supervised use of the computer room. “Here’s a community with nothing, we’re using school facilities to help everybody here to communicate and learn,” Zwane said.