toilets, while only 40% of them are connected to a municipal water supply. In addition, a mere 5% of schools have stocked science laboratories, while only 7.5% have stocked libraries and only 10% have stocked computer centres.12
Ironically, much of the reason for slow progress in improving school infrastructure lies in affirmative action in school management and in the public service. This has resulted in more experienced people being replaced with less experienced ones, leading to often sharp declines in efficiency and institutional memory.
By 2008 it was already evident that many schools were being badly managed by inexperienced or ineffective principals, who were failing to ensure proper teacher performance or make the best use of their limited resources. This was still the situation in 2011, when the National Planning Commission released its first draft of a ‘national development plan’ (NDP), intended to raise South Africa’s annual rate of economic growth to 5.4% over a period of 20 years. The NDP put the blame for poor schooling primarily on bad teaching, but it also linked failures in teaching to ‘the quality of school leadership’ and urged that school principals should in future have ‘minimum qualifications’. Though many of the NDP’s proposals for reform were omitted from the final version of the plan, the revised document did again stress the need for school principals to be appointed on merit.13 Implicitly, this call for merit-based appointments acknowledges the harm that has resulted from allowing affirmative action in this sphere to take precedence over competence and experience.
Affirmative action within the Department of Education and other relevant state departments has also inhibited both the provision of school infrastructure and the delivery of essential goods and services to schools. Overall, it has contributed to a significant loss of skills across the public service, as a skills audit released in 2004 by the minister of public service and administration made clear. This report found that 50% of public sector employees were lower-skilled workers, while 40% were semi-skilled workers. Astonishingly, only 2% had managerial skills and 8% had unspecified ‘other’ skills.14
Many posts across the public sector – especially those requiring scarce financial and management skills – have also been left vacant where black applicants cannot be found. As a result, even standard functions such as the procurement and distribution of textbooks and school desks are often poorly executed, leaving many schools without access to even the most basic of the resources required for effective teaching.15
In addition, the education bureaucracy has repeatedly shown itself to be unable to respond efficiently to new tasks. For example, in the 2007/08 budget, the National Treasury allocated R180 million to library grants for schools (this being the first tranche of a R1-billion grant aimed at improving public libraries in general). However, by January 2008, three months before the end of the financial year, South Africa’s nine provincial administrations had collectively managed to spend less than 25% of the allocated funds. The Department of Education also launched a Quality Improvement, Development, Support and Upliftment Programme (Qids UP), which was intended to provide poor schools with R80 000 each, specifically for books and other resources. However, implementation was again hampered by an inability within provincial administrations to spend the money made available.16
In 2012 the annual report of the Department of Basic Education found that ‘many schools did not receive all the learning, teaching and support material needed’, including textbooks, workbooks, and other resources. The proportions of schools that had received the relevant materials ranged from 38% in Mpumalanga and 52% in the Northern Cape to 84% in the Western Cape (which was administered by the Democratic Alliance, rather than the ANC). Moreover, even where schools had received workbooks, they were often in the wrong languages, making it difficult for pupils to use them.17
So poor was delivery in Limpopo, in particular, that in 2012 a non-governmental organisation called Section27 took the Department of Basic Education to court to compel it to provide textbooks to a number of schools that still remained without them five months into the school year. The shortfall affected all grades at these schools, but the negative impact was most keenly felt in grades 1, 2, 3 and 10, where a new curriculum had been introduced but could not be taught without new textbooks. Though the North Gauteng High Court ordered the department to deliver all the necessary textbooks by June 2012, three months later many of the textbooks had still not been provided. The minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga (who was reappointed to this position after the May 2014 general election), blamed this on ‘sabotage’. But by September 2012 more than 70 000 textbooks had still not been delivered, prompting another court order for this to be done by the following month.18
Given that the government had budgeted some R6.5 billion for textbooks, workbooks, and other learner support material in the 2012/13 financial year, a lack of money was unlikely to be the key problem. Comments Myburgh: ‘The inability of government to get textbooks and workbooks to schools in Limpopo, and who knows where else, … cannot be put down to … a lack of resources … It is rather the result of extreme state dysfunctionality with the civil service no longer able to perform even the most routine bureaucratic tasks.’19
Outcomes-based education
To provide redress for the alleged ‘rote learning’ of the apartheid era, the government also introduced a new system of teaching and learning, known as outcomes-based education (OBE). This was incorporated in a new curriculum, called Curriculum 2005, which was gradually introduced into schools from 1995 onwards, beginning with Grade 1. The new curriculum did little to guide teachers as to the specific content to be taught, for the idea was that they and their pupils would ‘jointly construct the curriculum’.
Said Penny Vinjevold, deputy director-general of education, in 2009: ‘Curriculum 2005 underspecified the content and was over designed with jargon. Teachers didn’t know what to teach, there was no testing, and the idea was that all children must progress to the next grade … The experiment was disastrous. The schools with the least resources in townships and rural areas suffered the most.’20
Though a revised ‘national curriculum statement’ was thereafter phased in from 2002 to 2008, many of the corrosive effects of OBE were still not adequately addressed. According to Jonathan Jansen, rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, many teachers fundamentally misunderstood OBE, believing that the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic had become less important as ‘kids were now expected to learn by themselves and teachers were not the centre anymore’.21
In 2010 The Times newspaper reported that the OBE system had seen ‘more than five million pupils leaving school unable to read or write adequately’. That same year, Zweli Mkhize, chairman of the ANC’s health and education committee and premier of KwaZulu-Natal, said the ruling party had been ‘pushed into rethinking its education policies because of the huge number of pupils who could not read or write. It had to act on an avalanche of complaints from pupils, teachers, and parents’.22
More reforms were introduced, this time in the form of ‘curriculum and assessment policy statements’ (Caps). These were intended to give teachers detailed guidance as to what they must teach, while also equipping them with textbooks and learning materials for every grade. Motshekga said ‘a massive training drive would be launched for teachers to enable them to handle the new curriculum’. However, these successive changes have left many teachers confused and resentful of change, further undermining commitment and morale. In 2009 Mugwena Maluleke, general secretary of the biggest teachers’ union, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu), said ‘teachers had been subjected to three major curriculum reviews in the past ten years, which had included fundamental changes in learning area definition and content, as well as new teaching and assessment methods. This had been accompanied by additional administration and paperwork, all carried out with only minimal support and training from the side of the department.’23
Jansen warns that OBE has caused the country enormous damage. Hundreds of millions of rands have been spent on training teachers, developing materials, conducting expensive
