Sue Blaine
16 May 2008
Johannesburg — FOR the first time in 24 years SA's schools are to be visited by inspectors this year, Education Minister Naledi Pandor told Parliament yesterday.
The education department has previously partly blamed SA's poor showing in international comparative standards tests in which SA's pupils often come last on the lack of a school inspection system.
A small cohort of school "evaluators" would begin work this year, and the education ministry would draft legislation to create an agency or institute to develop expertise in education evaluation and development, Pandor said when she presented her budget vote to Parliament.
"I believe this Parliament should not rise before it passes such legislation as it is key to supporting our aim to achieve quality education for all our learners," Pandor said.
There were also plans to improve teacher qualifications, with the education department aiming to ensure that every person teaching in a South African school was fully qualified by 2013.
About 10% of SA's teachers were underqualified or unqualified in 2001, according to research by the Human Sciences Research Council.
Pandor said she had commissioned more research on this issue, which would feed into a five-year plan -- to be implemented next year -- for a systemic approach to upgrading teachers' qualifications.
The country faced declining numbers of teachers, especially those qualified to teach the first three years of formal schooling and those qualified to teach mathematics, the sciences and technology. The education department was encouraged by the good response to its introduction of the state-funded Fundza Lushaka bursaries, specifically for education students.
However, the options for studying teaching needed to be expanded and the department had heard the calls from the African National Congress and others for the reopening of the teacher training colleges, Pandor said.
"Given that many college sites became our new very vital further education and training colleges we need to devise innovative strategies for responding. I hope to return to the house later this year to set out the department's proposal for expanded provision. We think it important to retain the higher- education role in qualifying teachers."
The teacher training colleges were closed in the early 1990s, and later some were absorbed into universities, because the education department claimed poor training was widespread.
The education sector's budget for this year is R123bn, R18,5bn of which is allocated to the education department, which passed R15,1bn of this on to SA's higher education sector, including the National Students' Financial Aid Scheme.
Close attention would be paid to those "wealthier" higher education institutions which were "not pursuing change as vigorously as we had antici- pated", the minister said.
There had been major achievements in higher education since the 2001 publication of the National Plan for Higher Education, which sought to transform the sector by setting down that 20% of matriculants should go on to higher education by 2015. It set an enrolment ratio of 40%:30%:30% in the humanities; business and commerce; and science, engineering and technology to be achieved by 2010.
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