Sue Blaine
19 November 2008
Johannesburg — THE call for a review of outcomes-based education (OBE) was only one of many points in a discussion document released by the African National Congress (ANC), education experts said yesterday.
The ruling party released the document, compiled at a recent education indaba, at the weekend and called for public debate on it. It is part of a larger ANC review of the education system, and party spokesman Steyn Speed said reports on higher education, skills development, and health would be made public when they were finalised.
Public debate has so far honed in on the call for a review of OBE and, if need be, its demise, but several education experts have pointed out that there is much more to the 51-page document than this.
The document lists six primary challenges to effective school education. It presents a 10-point programme for fixing the problem, starting with getting teachers to be "in class, on time, teaching" and to use textbooks, to implementing antipoverty measures that improve the teaching and learning environment. These are nutrition programmes, basic infrastructure for schools and social support for children.
Other recommendations are that the government focus on early childhood (preschool) and primary education; conduct external tests for grade 3 and grade 6 children yearly instead of every three years, and give parents the results; evaluate teachers according to how much their pupils improve, with results affecting their salaries; strengthen teacher quality and development; strengthen district office and school management capacities; increase the use of information technology in education; improve the alignment between national policy and provincial spending and develop a "social compact" for education that narrows down "non-negotiables" and performance targets.
The length of this list was problematic, although all the points made were valid, said JET Education Services CEO Dr Nick Taylor.
The document's proposed interventions needed "much debate", said the chairwoman of the forum of university education deans, Prof Mary Metcalfe.
Its suggestion that the provincial education departments' district offices be strengthened to provide support to teachers was "critical", but its call for more external testing would only detract from teaching time, with little effect on teacher performance, Metcalfe said.
The suggestion that teachers' pay should be linked to improvement in their pupils' performance was "extremely problematic", she said.
The document also calls for a greater link between national education policy and provincial education spending, something both the South African Democratic Teachers Union and the and the National Professional Teachers Organisation of SA said they would support.
However, Metcalfe said "more detailed and nuanced discussion" was needed, because centralisation could lead to inefficiencies.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) said the education department's new realism on the need for a review of OBE was to be welcomed.
The DA would be posing parliamentary questions to Education Minister Naledi Pandor, asking how she would "attend to" the document.
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