Thirty Years of Collaboration

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of being interviewed on Power FM by one of Africa’s leading journalists, Lerato Mbele, on the state of independent schools in South Africa. It is always gratifying when you are interviewed by a well informed and seasoned journalist who does their research on the independent education sector. This interview prompted me to reflect on how significantly the education landscape has changed in the last 30 years.

Now that South Africa has held its seventh democratic elections and we have in place a government of national unity (GNU), this is an opportune time to review the road the country has travelled in transforming its education system and assess the successes and failures of that journey. Like the citizens of most countries, with a few exceptions, South Africans have a tendency to bemoan the quality of their educational system. But on closer inspection, this harsh criticism may overlook much that has been achieved.

Every five years, ISASA holds a combined conference – the largest congregation of members, with governors, heads and bursars in attendance. At each of these conferences, the Minister of Basic Education delivers a keynote address.

I am forever grateful to our former Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, who, in her 2013 message to ISASA membership, congratulated me on my appointment and undertook to continue the strong working relationship with me as the incoming Executive Director of ISASA, similar to the one she had had with my predecessor.

Minister Motshekga was true to her word. Borne out of her commitment to every child in South Africa, throughout her tenure as Minister, she was steadfast in her view that her duty of care extended to all children attending schools in South Africa. She therefore led her department in a manner that facilitated the wellbeing of the independent education sector.

The impact of COVID-19

Minister Motshekga’s dedication to all children was evidenced during the COVID-19 1 pandemic. COVID shifted the regulatory terrain into new frontiers. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the pandemic, regulating schools, especially independent schools, required a distinct approach.

When the pandemic reached South Africa, it became evident that, due to the large infrastructure backlog, public schools in the country were unable to resume in-person instruction due to the lack of access to either water and/or ablution facilities. According to a 2021 article by Chris Jones, “There are 380 schools in South Africa with no water. There are a further 3,392 schools that still use pit latrines, affecting 34,489 teachers and 1,042,698 learners.” 2 This meant that during the pandemic, many public schools were unable to comply with the public health protocols required to stem the spread of the virus.

In contrast, most independent schools, as a result of having met stringent registration requirements, were able to return to classrooms sooner than many public schools. While there was some agitation in the public domain that all schooling be treated the same, Minister Motshekga was comfortable in a differentiated approach in order to enable as many children as possible to return to school as soon as it was feasible.

This was best illustrated in the drafting of the regulations that determined how schools could resume in-person instruction. Initially, the regulations required that, in order for independent schools to reopen, they would first need to comply with social distancing and public health protocols, and have this compliance verified by authorities, before they could permit their pupils to return to school.

Knowing the administrative backlog that would be created with inspections of every independent school before they were authorised to welcome their children back to campuses, ISASA pleaded with the Minister for an adjusted approach.

Rather than schools having to achieve compliance with the regulations and then be inspected before they could reopen, ISASA proposed that independent schools be allowed to proceed with reopening after fulfilling the regulatory requirements but that designated officials could subsequently inspect schools to verify that each had complied with the COVID-19 preventative strictures.

Should a school have failed to meet the prophylactic health standards, then it would be forced to return to online teaching and learning until it was able to adhere to the stipulated health protocols.

In fact, the first regulations were written in the former manner, and, after a virtual weekend meeting with the Minister, she accepted ISASA’s proposal and consented to amend the regulations to reflect the ability of schools to reopen before being inspected. For fee reliant institutions, this ministerial act of support enabled independent schools to financially recover more quickly, thus ensuring the survival of many of them.

Systemic inequalities and curriculum change

When Minister Motshekga was appointed to the education portfolio in 2009, at a systemic level, a great deal needed to be revised within the basic education system. Arguably, she was the first educationist with direct knowledge of the South African education sector to become the minister of education in a democratic South Africa.

Having been a teacher at Orlando High School, and a lecturer at the Soweto College of Education, and later at the University of the Witwatersrand, she had firsthand insights into the realities of classrooms in the country. Intuitively, she understood that the historical problems of inequality embedded into the system could only begin to be addressed through a sound curriculum. It should be noted that these inequities did not begin with apartheid but could be traced back hundreds of years. According to Luis Crouch and Ursula Hoadley:

“Though it is fairly common to look for the origins of South Africa’s education problems under the explicit apartheid policies that were introduced in the late 1940s, and culminating in the Bantu Education Act of 1953, in reality the attitudes, policies, and issue-treatment that determine the dynamics of the system until the end of the twentieth century go back at least three centuries—in fact, nearly all the way back to the founding of the Cape Colony in 1652.” 3

What Hoadley and Crouch clearly illustrate to us is that the expectation that South Africa’s education system be substantially improved in less than a decade and half cannot be realistic.

Unsurprisingly, democratic South Africa’s early education policy erred on the side of idealism over the practical delivery of a curriculum. Under the ministership of Kader Asmal, the second post-apartheid minister of education, South Africa introduced Curriculum 2005, also referred to as C2005, which was undergirded by outcome-based education (OBE) as the curriculum policy.

The laudable goal of OBE was to create a curriculum that would create a citizenship that had sufficient agency to participate fully within a democratic dispensation. As noted by Nico Botha, “The newly democratic African National Congress government has striven to root out apartheid education and to create a new vision of empowered citizens for South Africa.” 4

This called for a shift away from a classroom in which the teacher is the authoritative transmitter of the Christian nationalist curriculum and the custodian of all knowledge, to a forum in which learners are actively encouraged to become critical thinkers. The proposed method to achieve this end was OBE.

As explained by Masilonyana Motseke, “. . . OBE . . . was introduced in South Africa with the hope that it would strive to, among others, guarantee academic success for all learners, devolve ownership (to educators) by means of decentralised curriculum development and to empower learners in a learner-centred ethos.” 5

The introduction of such an ambitious curriculum into a system which had previously been deliberately designed to provide low-quality education to the vast majority of pupils, predictably, proved unsuccessful.

Minister Motshekga recognised that a curriculum with objectives but no ‘road map’ on how to achieve those outcomes undermined the aim of improving the quality of education for all South African children. A review committee, chaired by my mentor, Linda Chisolm, was tasked with evaluating OBE and Curriculum 2005. The committee concluded that:

“. . . while there was overwhelming support for the principles of outcomes-based education and Curriculum 2005, which had generated a new focus on teaching and learning, implementation has been confounded by:

  • a skewed curriculum structure and design
  • lack of alignment between curriculum and assessment policy
  • inadequate orientation, training and development of teachers
  • learning support materials that are variable in quality, often unavailable and not sufficiently used in classrooms
  • policy overload and limited transfer of learning into classrooms
  • shortages of personnel and resources to implement and support C2005
  • inadequate recognition of curriculum as the core business of education.” 6

Minister Motshekga’s remedy to these shortcomings was the introduction of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) in 2011. “CAPS entailed [a] detailed . . . return to a subject-based curriculum, clear content specification and strong controls over the sequence and pace of curriculum coverage.” 7 Under CAPS, South Africa’s curriculum is set out in detail from grades R to 12.

While CAPS has been widely criticised for being too prescriptive and of contributing to the ‘de-professionalisation’ of teachers, it has undoubtedly produced a stabilised system in which precisely what knowledge is to be learned is now clearly defined. It also articulates the outcomes the curriculum seeks to produce.

In a City Press article, Minister Motshekga, correctly in my view, believes that her greatest legacy is the introduction of CAPS to South African schools. She is quoted as saying, “When I came in . . . 2009, the first thing I did was to attend to the curriculum. To change outcomes-based education . . . to the curriculum assessment policy statement . . . ensured that we resource it, we train teachers and that there is more stability in the sector. People are clear about what they need to teach and how to assess it. We all have common understanding of where we are going.” 8

In this way, all children in South African schools know what needs to be learned and how it will be assessed. At least at the curriculum level, this means that resource variability is not embedded within it.

Although when UMALUSI accredits independent schools, it has a tendency to require slavish compliance with CAPS, I have noted that Minister Motshekga often commended schools that applied their minds to how best to implement CAPS, even accepting deviation from its sequencing, if schools could prove that, by doing so, they improved student performance. For independent schools, she has supported the view that our sector meets CAPS outcomes, but that they have ‘independence’ in how those outcomes are achieved.

A new chapter

The first new education minister in more than a decade, Minister Siviwe Gwarube, takes over a stable department whose core function of delivering the curriculum is well established. ISASA notes that, as she builds on the work of her predecessor, Minister Gwarube has identified the elimination of pit latrines as a primary goal of her administration.

In light of the national failure to ensure the dignity of children by having sanitary and safe ablution facilities in all schools, we must all support Minister Gwarube in her objective.

As the oldest, largest and most representative independent schools’ association, ISASA hopes to forge a close working relationship with her, as we had with her predecessor, to advance quality education for all children in South Africa.

  1. Novel Coronavirus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) []
  2. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2021-11-03-pit-latrines-and-lack-of-access-to-clean-water-at-schools-is-a-national-outrage/[]
  3. https://academic.oup.com/book/26187/chapter/194303266[]
  4. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED477153[]
  5. https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA1684498X_71[]
  6. https://repository.hsrc.ac.za/bitstream/handle/20.500.11910/8248/2285_Chisholm_PoliticsofCurriculumReview.pdf[]
  7. https://www.scielo.br/j/ep/a/ZfVV9Njf48SMGYSNK4nWZYm/?format=pdf&lang=en[]
  8. https://www.news24.com/citypress/news/newsmaker-angie-believes-her-legacy-is-a-stable-curriculum-20190106[]