Mexico’s lesson for SA on maximising classrooms
During former finance minister Pravin Gordhan’s 2017 budget speech, he said: “Working with the Department of Basic Education on costeffective standards for building design, we have reduced the average cost of new schools from R70m for 7,500m² to R34m.”
That is a considerable saving. But consider just how dramatic SA’s school backlog is and how many R34m schools need building; perhaps the scale of the task at hand begs for a new approach.
During a speech on Youth Day in 2016, President Jacob Zuma claimed that 795 schools had been built since 2009 (although Africa Check put the figure at 722).
Still, at R34m a pop — if not more — and given the time frames involved in building a new school, it is hardly surprising that demand is outstripping supply.
In a 2014 document, the Gauteng education department said that by 2020, it expected to be short of 1,373 classrooms.
In 2015, the KwaZulu-Natal education department was quoted in The Mercury newspaper as saying it needed almost 6,000 more classrooms, 3,000 libraries, 4,808 laboratories and 3,178 computer rooms. It called deadlines set by the national government, designed to eliminate the infrastructure backlogs at schools, “unrealistic”.
In Gauteng, this is exacerbated by a swelling population. A 2016 report entitled Budgets & Bricks, by Cornerstone Economic Research economist Carmen Abdoll and released under the auspices of the Centre for Child Law at the University of Pretoria, noted that since 2009, “Gauteng’s population has grown on average by 3.72% per annum, which is the highest growth rate of the nine provinces”.
Migration into Gauteng, although unsurprising, is putting pressure on existing infrastructure and services.
The failure to plan for this surge of people resulted in 58,000 Gauteng pupils not being placed in schools at the beginning of 2017.
The number was reduced to 7,092 unplaced pupils by mid-January.
While Gauteng education department spokesman Oupa Bodibe blamed late applications, he said in a Cape Talk interview: “At the end of the day what is the issue here is that Gauteng needs to build 200 new schools. And we are building at least 10 per year.”
While national and provincial governments battle to catch up with the demand for public school admissions, there may be an immediate answer staring SA in the face.
Mexico, a country also facing a school shortage, has an effective way of squeezing the most out of its schooling infrastructure: ensure they work around the clock.
A veritable conveyor belt of learning, school shifts run in the morning, afternoon and at night (also accommodating adult education). Families in the industrial city of Monterrey — the Johannesburg of the country’s north – often have one child attending morning classes and another attending afternoon classes or even afternoon-evening classes.
Rather than railing against the system, parents fall over themselves to ensure their children attend school during the designated time frame, with no arguments. These Monterrey schools are among the highest-rated in Mexico and Latin America.
“Graduating from a school like CIDEB sets up a child for life and all but assures entry into the best international universities,” said a parent from Monterrey.
Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Educación Bilingüe – to give CIDEB its full and rather grand title — is a government-run institution.
Mexico has had years to perfect the system, with its double-shift schooling innovation dating back to the 1950s and as far back as 1901 for schools offering night classes to workers.
A 42-year-old woman from Ciudad Valles, a town in the eastern part of Mexico’s San Luis Potosi state, says: “The afternoon schools — and even night-school shifts – have been in Mexico for as long as I can remember.
“When I was in primary school, there was already some morning and afternoon classes for kids who lived in the orphanage. The costs were covered or helped by payments of those with the financial means,” she says.
This approach has helped Mexico improve its education offering drastically and bring down illiteracy levels. According to international statistics research firm Statistica, in 2015, the country’s literacy rate was 94.56% — up from below 50% in the 1940s.
There is nothing to stop SA’s government from applying this “split shift” approach to maximising the use of school infrastructure in high-density provinces such as Gauteng and the Western Cape.
Adopting this system could buy the government time, enabling it to prioritise catching up on the backlog in underserviced provinces such as the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, while ensuring all pupils can be placed in school from the first day of the term, no matter which province they call home.
There is, of course, a fly in the ointment: teachers. A 2015 report by The Centre for Development and Enterprise was crystal-clear on the looming teacher crisis across the country.
The report made note of the increase in pupil enrolments at schools, requiring the need for more teachers.
With respect to rising pupil numbers, the report said: “These are expected to rise from some 12.4-million in 2013 to 13.4-million in 2023, after which they will decrease to 13.3-million in 2025.
“However, growth in learner enrolment will not be smooth owing to unexpected dips and peaks in birth rates and uneven learner progression through the system.”
Irrespective of the difficulties in predicting the exact pupil numbers future education will be faced with, it is self-evident that SA needs more teachers.
Said the report: “To meet the increased learner enrolment, the teaching force will need to expand from around 426,000 in 2013 to around 456,000 in 2025, an increase of approximately 30,000 teachers over 12 years.”
With the increased global focus on issues such as technology in education, “smart” schools and the application of innovative – often digital — ways of teaching, diverting bricksand-mortar budgets into upskilling teachers and expanding the pool of competent, professional teachers may hold more promise for SA’s ineffective public education system than building hundreds of additional structures in which teachers will simply dole out more of the same inadequate and antiquated learning to the country’s disgruntled youth.