ANC Today --------------------------------------------------------------------- Volume 8, No. 11, 21-27 March 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------- THIS WEEK: * Education: A call to focus on firm foundations for learning * Housing: Restoring dignity through viable settlements --------------------------------------------------------------------- EDUCATION A call to focus on firm foundations for learning The Foundations for Learning Campaign, which we launched earlier this week, is a call to schools and communities to focus on reading, writing and calculating. The campaign will set out our expectations for teaching and learning in the foundation and intermediate phases. It will indicate and provide the resources needed for effective teaching. It will also spell out the testing required to check that learners are reaching the required standards from year to year. Quality education is determined in the first years that a child spends at school. Maria Montessori was one of many educationists who believe that the foundations of human development are laid during the child's early years. She declared that: "The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six." This period is quality education's "golden hour", those years in which a child is taught the fundamental skills and competencies that will enable him or her to learn and to develop a clear conception of the world. The "golden hour" in education begins in the foundation phase, grades R to three and is consolidated in the intermediate phase in grades four to six. It is in this "golden hour" that a child learns to read so that in the future they can read to learn. They gain the skills necessary to understand the textbooks that they will need to read and to study in order to succeed in the matric exams and in her university studies. In the foundation phase a child learns to express themselves, to put their thoughts on paper, to describe and later to explain the world around them. They begin to understand the concept and the power of numbers. The capacity to read, write and calculate well is the foundation of quality education. While there is much to celebrate in post-1994 education, our scores in international assessments of reading and numeracy have been poor to alarming. The aim of these international rankings is to spur reform. Many countries have made the step change required to improve learner performance through the introduction of national literacy strategies. It is our turn now. It is our turn now to start where the impact will be the greatest, to focus our attention on the foundations for learning. Already we have over 600,000 young children attending grade R classes and we are committed to providing universal grade R education by the 2010. Our commitment is not only to having young learners in class, but our commitment is to ensuring that these youngsters receive quality grade R education in which they develop their sense of self, their self confidence and their understanding of the world around them. Importantly, grade R teachers will teach them literacy and numeracy skills, so that they know how to engage with books, so that they know that stories come from the books we read and so that they understand the concept of numbers in the world around them. They will hit the ground running when they arrive in Grade 1. So what is it that we must do in Grade 1 to take the excitement and interest in learning forward? We want to be sure that every teacher, every principal, every manager in the education system knows exactly what must be done to provide and track quality education. We want to be sure that every learner accepts the challenges of learning and that every parent and guardian accepts the responsibility of having a learner in the house. We want to be sure that we all do the basics right and then build on those basics to develop quality teaching and learning in all our schools. Non-negotiables The foundations for learning campaign will lay a solid foundation in languages and mathematics in the foundation and intermediate phases. The measure of that foundation will be that we will increase the average learner performance in languages and mathematics to no less than 50% in the four years of the campaign. In 2011, we will conduct a national evaluation, which will assess the languages and mathematics abilities of learners in South Africa. In order to succeed the campaign will require the following: * That every classroom has the appropriate resources for effective teaching. A list of basic resources is contained in the government gazette on this campaign published on 14 March 2008. Each school must ensure that every teacher has at least the basic minimum resources in the classroom. * That teachers plan and teach effectively. All teachers are expected to be in their classes teaching planned lessons during contact teaching time. The timetable must require that every learner in the primary school engages in reading at school for 30 minutes every day, writes a piece of extended writing appropriate to the grade, engages in mental maths for 10 minutes and written maths for 20 minutes every day. * That district teacher forums are established in all districts. Teachers are expected to be a member of the district forum, or of a school forum, so that ideas, experience and best practice is shared and teachers can enhance their teaching strategies. * That teachers assess learner performance regularly. Standardised assessments will be provided by the Department of Education and the results of these assessments must be reported to the district office from where the results for each school will be sent, via the provincial office, to my office. To assist teachers to manage the assessment tasks within the continuous assessment framework, my department will provide milestones for expected attainment in mathematics and languages per term per grade. Annual tests based on the quarterly assessments will be provided to all schools. Those are the "non-negotiables" of the foundations for learning campaign. The McKinsey report on top performing education systems in the world shows that the best systems focus on three important things: they get the best teachers (they take the top third of graduates); they get the best out of teachers; and they step in when pupils start to lag behind. We are asking every principal to step in to prevent pupils from lagging behind. The core purpose of principalship is to provide leadership and management in all areas of the school. As leaders, principals set the targets for their schools and design strategic plans in which they motivate and inspire their teachers and learners to attain these targets. As managers, they make sure that the targets are achieved. We expect every principal of a public school to prepare a plan setting out how academic performance at the school level will be improved. It is the responsibility of each and every principal to manage and support teachers in their effort to improve the ability of learners to read, write, count and calculate at the appropriate level. The success of the plan will be measured in the performance of the learners in the end of the year standardised assessment. District officials will coordinate the collection and collation of data from the quarterly tests for reporting to the province. Role of parents The responsibility to teach our children to read, right and calculate is not the teacher's responsibility alone. That responsibility is shared with parents as well. Parents' obligations do not end with the payment of school fees, or taxi fares to get their child to a school that offers quality education. It is their responsibility to ensure that their children do their homework, and that their children read with them or to them every day. Not only will parents be giving their child the best possible grounding in life, but they will also build a bond with their child that can never be broken and that in itself is important in a world where parents and children so easily drift apart. Our call goes well beyond the small circle of a school community. We appeal to public figures, to unions, to businesses big and small, to institutions of higher education, to non-profit organisations, to join hands with your local school community and assist them in whatever way you can to reach the goals of universal competency in reading, writing and calculating. We know what we wish to achieve in our education system. In the foundation phase learners must learn how to read, write, count and calculate confidently and with understanding. In the intermediate phase, learners must extend their competency in reading, writing and calculating. They must have learnt to read so that they can read to learn. When learners reach high school, they must be able to work with their teachers in class but also be able to continue their studies outside of the classroom because they have learnt to be independent learners. In this campaign, we appeal to the South African community to join in a determined effort to ensure that teachers teach, principals manage, learners learn, and parents support the education of their children. Working together, we can ensure that every learner will have the opportunity for a better life in the future. From the child in Cape Town to the child in Limpopo, reading, writing, counting and calculating will take them to the forefront of development in the 21st century. ** Naledi Pandor is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) and Minister of Education. This is an edited extract from an address at the launch of the Foundations for Learning Campaign, Cape Town, 18 March 2008. --------------------------------------------------------------------- HOUSING Restoring dignity through viable settlements The Cape High Court judgement concerning the application by Thubelisha and government to relocate the residents of the Joe Slovo informal settlement to temporary shelter in Delt while their permanent housing is being constructed, provides yet again, another major lesson from the N2 Gateway project. It dispels the myth that this government is involved in the kind of mass evictions last witnessed during apartheid's notorious policy of forced removals, that displaced millions of people across the country. As the Judge President of the Cape High Court, John Hlophe, correctly pointed out in the judgement the application was never about "normal eviction". It was about "a strategic relocation of Joe Slovo residents" to enable government to build decent, secure and comfortable houses for the residents of Joe Slovo. We all know that successive apartheid governments denied black people, and Africans in particular, the right to own land, based on the assumption that they were all but migrants in the urban areas. They did not allow them to own land or even rent a house. They stripped them of their dignity forcing them to live in conditions of poverty, squalor and degradation: conditions that were never fit to settle any human being in. In Langa, hostels such as Old Flats and Special Quarters became as recently as the 1980s the only means by which the state provided a form of shelter to an ever increasing African population. In a most painful and debilitating experience that first year students at universities should continue to read about men aged 50 became with their wives and children "bedholds" as Mamphela Ramphele calls them in her book 'A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Hostels of Cape Town'. As she explained, this was because denied of every possible right to reside within Cape Town, even within a hostel, they were allowed by law to only rent a bed. The bed, Ramphele explains, was "the common denominator of space allocation". Every aspect of life such as relationships, employment, identity and ability to evade forceful removal depended on access to a bed. This is not centuries ago, but in 1988, six years before the first democratic elections in 1994. The bed, she says, was passed on down from father to son, going back a generation or two. Meanwhile, such was the pressure building up that after in the early 1990s people decided to build the squatter settlement we know today as Joe Slovo. Tellingly, it adjoins the hostels that degraded the lives of so many before now. And like the hostels it crammed 4,500 families within an extremely limited land area of 30 hectares. Which government in the world provided a mandate to radically improve the living conditions of its people would not want to focus on the plight of the residents of Joe Slovo? As the ANC we realised early on that to overcome the criminal legacy of apartheid we had to address the kind of housing backlog that emanates from places such as Joe Slovo. This eventually, became a constitutional obligation once the new constitution was adopted in 1996. Now, after 12 years of learning lessons from the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the Breaking New Ground strategy has provided us with a plan of how to bring fully back the dignity of the people of Joe Slovo and not merely provide them with shelter. They deserve much more, given the legacy. They deserve a conducive environment to bring up their families; send their children to schools and see them play and grow within their vicinity far from danger; be close to places of employment; and finally be integrated with the rest of society. They need to see, feel and experience their dignity coming back to them. This is what we owe them as this government. And I hope that society too finally realises that it owes them this much. It is for this reason that the relocation is not "normal" but "strategic". While decent houses are being built temporary shelter is being provided for them at the cost of government. I am not aware of any government in the world that looks after its people in that way. In fact, in countries such as Brazil the government expects the poor to pay rent. Moreover, what we are providing for the people of Joe Slovo is so incontestably better than the present that even our most strident critics cannot escape this recognition. Their only problem is that we are relocating people, something that is made necessary by the limitations of land. I cannot imagine that we would have fought to preserve degrading conditions of squalor and hopelessness for the poor. Indeed, those who continue to instigate resistance to relocations that are aimed at bettering the lives of our people do so from the comfort of their middle class zones. They do so not articulating nor representing the views of the people they purport to represent. They do so out of cocooned ideological positions. Fortunately now the courts are the final arbiters in determining what to do when the state's constitutional responsibility is being challenged in the face of a most serious housing problem the country has to contend with. A backlog of 2.2 million people who are waiting for housing opportunities is nothing to trifle with as it is an extremely urgent problem over which there is no luxury to be overly academic about. As this government, we have been tested to the limit and our policies have passed the test. That is fundamental progress and an essential step for us. Over and over again our policy passed the constitutionality test thereby reaffirming what we have always known. This is that the policies are well thought out and they have balanced all the necessary requirements to constitutionally transform society taking into account its history. Where we have been found wanting, as in the Grootboom case, we quickly moved to repair the harm. Therefore, despite the agitations of malcontents and detractors our policies remain sound, solid and responsive to the needs of the people. The shrill voices they have ring hollow even to themselves. For we have been vindicated. The application for relocation was a very bold step to take. It was necessary though in the face of all the deliberate obstructions that were put in the way of the N2 Gateway project, which I am convinced, is being targeted for political and ideological reasons. Hence, we take this as a yet another lesson hoping that out of it society too continues to learn. ** Lindiwe Sisulu is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) and Minister of Housing. --------------------------------------------------------------------- This issue of ANC Today is available from the ANC web site at: http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2008/at11.htm To receive ANC Today free of charge by e-mail each week go to: http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/subscribe.html To unsubscribe yourself from the ANC Today mailing list go to: http://lists.anc.org.za/mailman/listinfo/anctoday