Involved in Grahamstown education

I READ with interest Mpumelelo Ncwadi’s letter, “Grahamstown in a poor state” (January 4), in which she expresses her concerns about local governance and education.

As the dean of the education faculty at Rhodes University, I should like to explain how Rhodes University is responding to the poor state of schooling in Grahamstown and why establishing a “Rhodes University High School” is not an appropriate solution to the crisis.

I also respond to the question of “how hard is it to establish a teacher accreditation programme for the local township school?”.

The vice-chancellor of Rhodes University, Dr Sizwe Mabizela, is committed to re-positioning Rhodes University so that it is not just “in Grahamstown but is also of and for Grahamstown”.

In 2015, he assembled a team of individuals in the education sector to conceptualise and implement an intervention for quality education for all in Grahamstown, focusing on the public school sector.

This intervention includes a Nine Tenths mentoring programme involving accredited Rhodes student volunteer mentors.

Three schools currently involved in the project are being developed into centres of excellence to support future initiatives.

To date, the programme has significantly improved the three schools’ performance (52 pupils received bachelor’s passes in 2017 – 20 more than 2016).

In February last year, for the first time in Rhodes’s history, more than 100 students from local quintile one, two and three schools registered at Rhodes University (up from 11 in 2009).

Furthermore, one of the three township schools in the programme outperformed a local ex-Model C school for the first time in Grahamstown’s history.

Rhodes University is also responding to the education crisis in early childhood education (ECE) by establishing links between students in university residences and 14 ECE sites in the Grahamstown community.

The Business School has also offered accredited school leadership courses for principals, deputies and heads of department in local schools to upskill and strengthen school leadership.

Rhodes is committed to building public schooling from within rather than depleting schools of academically talented pupils.

Establishing a Rhodes University High School, as suggested by Ncwadi, would not achieve the goal of quality education for all.

It would widen the deeply entrenched quality gap in South African schooling.

Mabizela’s Reviving Grahamstown Schools initiative builds capacity within the institutions themselves so that more children can benefit in the future.

This brings me to the question of “how hard is it to establish a teacher accreditation programme for the local township schools?”.

The Rhodes education faculty currently has more than 400 in-service teachers undertaking further teacher education qualifications in critical subjects (mathematics, English language teaching, information technology and science education).

Additionally, the faculty has almost 300 students registered for pre-service teacher education qualifications.

The Grahamstown education crisis is not something that can be resolved overnight.

However, we are confident that the initiatives we are implementing are having, and will continue to have, positive outcomes for our broader community.

I invite Ncwadi to visit the Rhodes education department so that I can share more of our exciting work with her.

Professor Di Wilmot, dean of education, Rhodes University