Gauteng holds talks to keep classes going in June holidays
The Gauteng government is negotiating with labour unions and other education sector stakeholders to scrap the June school holidays due to the disruption caused by SA’s Covid-19 outbreak.
Gauteng is SA’s most densely populated province and has emerged as the country’s Covid19 epicentre. By Wednesday, 319 of SA’s 709 confirmed cases were in Gauteng.
Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi said on Wednesday the government hopes to scrap the June school holidays to enable schools to catch up on the missed learning opportunities triggered by their early closure ahead of the Easter holidays, and the three-week national lockdown, which begins at midnight on Thursday.
Schools closed on March 18 and are due to resume teaching on April 15, but the lockdown means they will remain closed until at least April 20. Pupils will have been away from their classrooms for at least a month by the time schools reopen.
“When we come back, we want to run without a break because there have already been breaks,” said Lesufi.
The Gauteng provincial government will be implementing a range of measures to help pupils during the coming weeks. Learning material will be broadcast from April 1 on two DStv
MultiChoice channels and on several SABC radio stations.
Agreements have been signed with Telkom and Vodacom to provide free education material to their subscribers, Lesufi said.
Once schools re-open, catch-up programmes will take place on Saturdays and afternoons, and there will be study camps during the September holidays.
The Gauteng provincial government said content could be retrieved by learners on the following websites: education.gauteng.gov.za; mathsisfun.com; learn.khanacademy.org; phet.colorado.edu; and za.ixl.com.
Lesufi said the school nutrition programme, which provides meals to needy children in primary and secondary schools, will be converted into a grocery donation programme managed by NGOs.
● ● ● ● ●
He said that if someone fell ill in Gauteng, the province would be able to ensure that the patient got the best available treatment.
“The lockdown will be undermined by people who wants to be out of here before it takes effect,” he said.
“The nationwide lockdown means that wherever you go, you can ’ t come back. We are worried about the people of Gauteng who go somewhere else who might be infected and who might spread the infections,” Makhura said.
The premier said that the biggest areas of risk remained the public transport system and the province’s high-density human settlements where social distancing was difficult.
Those included informal settlements with limited access to health services, inadequate supply of water and high incidence of poverty and hunger.
The Gauteng provincial government would focus on providing food, sanitisers and bars of soap to cushion the poor and food-insecure households who are in the database of the departments of social development, health and education.
The province’s priority would be children, elderly people, homeless people and those who are food insecure.
Among the new measures announced on Wednesday was that the province had arranged with boarding schools in various parts of the province to accommodate willing homeless people during this time.
Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi, who is also part of the province’s task team dealing with the outbreak, said the province would be opening 24 more centres where abused women could go during the lockdown period.
Lesufi also announced that the provincial government was in the process of negotiating with labour and various other stakeholders for the cancellation of the June school holidays in a bid to catch up on the disrupted academic year.
319 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Gauteng by Wednesday
3 the number of weeks SA will be locked down