Thabo Mohlala

Schooling came to a complete halt on Tuesday this week in QwaQwa and surrounding areas in the Free State province as disgruntled residents shut down activities over service delivery concerns.

Although QwaQwa is the flashpoint of the protest, the communities of Kestrel and Harrismith were also affected, with schooling taking the hardest knock. The areas fall under Maluti-A-Phofung Local Municipality.

A school principal of a school in Kestrel, who did not want his name to be mentioned because he is not authorised to speak to the media, told Inside Education that the issues raised by the residents have nothing to do with education.

He said schooling had been disrupted since the protest started and by the look of things the chaos would continue until over the weekend.

“The provincial department of education has not intervened let alone said anything since then.  I went to speak to my district manager who advised me to take precautionary measures to ensure no one gets hurts during the protest. Only 5% of the learners pitched for classes as most feared for their safety,” said the principal.

He said yesterday one of the youth was shot dead by the police during the protest, adding this will undoubtedly escalate the residents’ anger.

“That is why I say I don’t see this protest coming to an end anytime soon, at least not this week. The impact of this will obviously be enormous on education in the affected areas.”

He said what made the situation worse was the way residents’ demands were responded to.

“The mayor was arrogant and very adamant telling residents it is only the ANC that can remove him because he was put there by it,” said principal.

Free State education MEC, Tate Makgoe responded via twitter appealing to the communities to allow schooling to proceed while they resolved their problems with the relevant authorities.

“We have lost two days thus far, no learning or teaching taking place there. We appeal to the communities of Kestrel, QwaQwa and Harrismith to allow schools to operate while they express their grievances over service delivery matters. It’s Day 2 and no schooling in the area,” Makgoe

The use of service delivery related grievances to shut down activities, including schools, is a strategy commonly used by communities to extract concessions from the government. In 2012 parents from a community in the Northern Cape forcefully closed 54 schools for nearly three months to back their demands for have a stretch of road between their villages tarred.

The recent and widely reported community protests took place in Vuwani where scores of schools were torched as residents demanded their own municipality.

Barbara Maregele

Charred rubble, shards of glass, tattered clothing and dirty nappies are some of the items dumped on an open strip of land belonging to Arcadia Primary School in Bonteheuwel.

Despite efforts by the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) and the local ward councillor, people continue to illegally dump rubble and vandalise the security fences around the area.

Deputy principal Suleiman Stanley says learners often have to walk through the dirt to get into the school grounds, which is a health and safety concern. “People burn scrap for copper right next to our gates and the smoke comes into the school on a daily basis. The City Council cleaned the area before school ended last year but look, the rubbish just piled up again, with people from around here using this as a dump site.”

Stanley, who has worked at the school since 1990, says it wasn’t until four years ago that they discovered that the piece of land belonged to the school.

“People have always used that space as a walkway. Whenever the WCED visited, they always asked why our grounds were so small for the amount of learners we had. Now we realise that the school grounds are actually bigger, so we can expand,” he says.

WCED spokesperson Millicent Merton confirmed that a fence erected in August 2016 had been vandalised during the school holidays four months later.

Stanley says new black fencing at a cost of R1 million was erected around the larger school perimeter in 2016. “The guys came and cut pieces of the gate so they could walk and drive their cars through again to the soccer field. The new motor on our front gate was also smashed and parts stolen.

“Law enforcement is based in Bonteheuwel, so they can’t say they aren’t aware of this. I saw the guys being fined when school started but that was it,” says Stanley.

He says because the school is situated where most of the gang shootings occur, it is important to use the space to make it safer for the learners at school. He says it is up to the community to take pride in the area.

Bonteheuwel ward councillor Angus McKenzie says he sometimes sent trucks and municipal workers to help the school clear the property, though that was not the City’s responsibility. “The City in most cases does not clean land that does not belong to it. There’s a privately-run dumping site a kilometre from the school and a City facility about 3 km away. It boils down to attitude. Our greatest challenge here is our attitudes,” he says.

Information about the City of Cape Town’s recycling and waste drop-off facilities is in its website.

Published originally on GroundUp.

Thabo Mohlala

The Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) seems to be on course to conclude the placement of all Grade 1 and 8 learners in the province before the end of February. At the beginning of this week, the number of the unplaced learners stood at 3,366.

Yesterday the number was whittled down to 690 and GDE’s spokesperson, Steve Mabona, told Inside Education earlier this morning that in their estimation they should have wrapped up the process by next week.

“If all goes according to plan probably we would be done with the placement of learners before the end of next week,” said Mabona.

He said this was significant progress considering the number of learners they had to place in schools across the province when the academic year started in mid-January.

“The challenge we have is lack of space to accommodate all the learners who come to the province every year. Most schools are full but we have to try and find them space. We are trying to cope with the learner influx by opening a school every month. We have specifically targeted areas that show rapid growth such as Midrand and Fourways Corridors where parents who cannot afford to take their children to private schools turn to public schools,” said Mabona.

MEC Panyaza Lesufi said they would rather deal with overcrowding than deny kids a space to learn.

Mabona said the programme of building schools is ongoing and although resources are insufficient they try to make money available by reprioritising their budget.  In a press release last week, Mabona said the main cause of the learner enrolment backlog is due to the relocation of parents from other provinces to Gauteng.  

He said the highest number of relocation is from the Free State at 61, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with 56 applications and Limpopo with 51.

The department also said they received relocation of learners from countries such as Zimbabwe, Burundi and India.

Michael Gaotlhobogwe and Adri Du Toit

The African continent is home to a large number of young people – and it simply doesn’t have jobs for them all. Youth unemployment is high across the continent.

Some countries, like Nigeria and Kenya have tried to tackle this problem by equipping children with entrepreneurial skills while they’re still at school.

This equips children with essential foundational knowledge and skills such as emotional intelligence and risk taking; it also develops their appreciation for self-employment opportunities. This means that when such children find themselves in a situation where they are unemployed, they don’t give up and succumb to self-pity. Instead, they are able to use their skills to create new opportunities as entrepreneurs.

Both have long made entrepreneurship training part of their schools’ vocational subjects and technology classes. For some years, teachers in these subjects have been trained in entrepreneurship education.

Of course, inculcating a culture of entrepreneurship can’t entirely eradicate the problem of youth unemployment. But it can reduce unemployment by giving young people the skills they need to create their own businesses and generate work for themselves or others outside the formal job market.

And a large body of research from around the world has shown that entrepreneurship education should start from an early age.

We set out to see whether Botswana and South Africa could make some inroads into their youth unemployment problems by introducing entrepreneurship into their schools’ curriculum. South Africa’s youth unemployment rate stands at about 55%. Botswana’s is around 34%.

Botswana offers an optional subject called Design and Technology from junior high school level (pupils in these grades are aged between 12 and 15). In South Africa, Technology is offered as a compulsory subject at various phases of the school curriculum.

We found that the current curricula in both countries do not include explicit entrepreneurship content. On top of this teachers in these subjects aren’t trained to pass on knowledge or information about entrepreneurship. This is a real missed opportunity given that in Nigeria and Kenya the subject of technology is a good vehicle for supporting and developing pupils’ entrepreneurial skills.

Entrepreneurship in schools makes sense

In Botswana and South Africa, entrepreneurship-related programmes are offered to people who have already left school. Botswana’s government has introduced initiatives like the Youth Empowerment Scheme and the Youth Development Fund to encourage and empower young people with entrepreneurial and survival skills such as interpersonal, risk taking, emotional intelligence, as well as being able to identify opportunities, and financial skills in general.

In South Africa, the National Youth Development Agency includes an entrepreneurship development programme. This aims to help young entrepreneurs access the relevant skills, knowledge, values and attitudes needed to develop and create their own businesses. But entrepreneurship programmes are not coordinated and often not managed well in South Africa. So very few young people actually benefit from them.

In principle, the programmes are good. But they haven’t worked because the people they’re meant to benefit don’t have the right skills to take advantage of what’s being offered. This could be addressed if entrepreneurial skills were being instilled at an early age – in the school curriculum.

Use existing resources

So why don’t schools in Botswana and South Africa simply introduce an entirely new subject that’s devoted to entrepreneurship?

The reason, as we point out in our research, is that the school curriculum is a hugely contested space in any country. Many subjects are competing for space and recognition, and it’s a long, complex process to introduce an entirely new subject.

That’s why we suggest that the southern African neighbours could learn from Kenya and Nigeria by merging entrepreneurship education with an existing subject. Technology, or Design and Technology, is the ideal home for this since these subjects already incorporate a number of skills any good entrepreneur needs. These include problem solving, critical thinking, teamwork and production or making skills, which learners develop in Technology when they design and physically make a product.

When learners can see the results of applying their knowledge and skills into actual products – which could be sold or somehow used to create an income – their learning immediately becomes more valuable.

Technology teachers will need to be trained in entrepreneurship education. But this is a worthwhile investment both for the individual teachers and their own skills and the value they’ll be able to add for their pupils.

Michael Gaotlhobogwe, Senior Lecturer in Curriculum and Instruction, University of Botswana and Adri Du Toit, Lecturer in Consumer Studies and Technology Education, North-West University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.