NONTOBEKO MTSHALI
S CHOOL principals and their deputies could be forced to sign contracts with “clear performance targets”.
This comes soon after the annual national assessment – a test to measure the ability to write, read and count – revealed that Grade 1 and 3 pupils were poorly prepared.
Now authorities want to use pass rates as a measure of the performance of principals and their deputies.
Performance contracts have been proposed in the past, but never got past the drafting stage.
Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga says the poor performance of lower grade pupils wanted “an effective monitoring and evaluation system” to improve education quality.
Yesterday, Department of Basic Education spokesman Granville Whittle said the principals would be given clear targets to meet. He said the contracts, which would be compulsory for all principals and deputies to sign, would enable the department to hold schools accountable.
“Our intention is to start with principals and their deputies. This will be extended to heads of department, and if this works well and becomes entrenched in the system, the department will consider an extension to teachers.”
However, performance assessment has always been a contentious issue.
In 2002, teachers chased away school evaluators and forced the department to suspend the performance-evaluating system.
Education analyst Graeme Bloch said the basic education system got rid of inspectors in the early 1990s because they were part of the apartheid legacy. Since then, he said, there had been no effective system in place to monitor and hold teachers accountable.
Mugwena Maluleke, national general secretary of the SA Democratic Teachers Union, said the union was against performance contracts.
The biggest teachers’ union – and an affiliate of Cosatu – argues that if teachers were assessed on pupils’ performance, the rating would not consider social conditions outside the classroom.
But Maluleke emphasised the union was not against teachers being held accountable. The problem, he said, was that the department continually introduced new systems.
He said that in 2007, when Naledi Pandor was minister of education, the department had met unions with the intention of establishing a framework that would spell out, among other things, what targets principals and their deputies would have to meet.
“The department never came back to us about that… and now they want to introduce these contracts.”
Briefing reporters in Parliament in 2008, Pandor said teachers rated each other highly during peer review assessments, but their performances in class were shocking.
Two years ago, President Jacob Zuma blasted teachers for spending too little time in township classrooms, prompting an angry response from Sadtu.
Bloch and Maluleke said the department also had to ensure it provided adequate support to schools and teachers – something Motshekga admits is lacking.