Sadtu digs in over a matter of principal
The teachers’ union says it hasn’t been consulted on mooted performance pacts for school heads
Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga has blamed the five-year delay in implementing performance agreements for principals on the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) but the union disputes this, saying these had never been agreed to in the first place.
Performance agreements for principals have been on the cards since 2011, when the department announced that they would be signed by the end of 2012. They are still not in place.
Last month, in a written parliamentary reply to a question by the Democratic Alliance’s Gavin Davis on why there had been such a lengthy delay in finalising the matter, Motshekga said all the other unions had signed a collective agreement, in effect providing for individual performance agreements with principals, except for Sadtu.
Motshekga said every principal was required “to develop work plans with clear targets and deliverables for their respective schools” — as part of the Quality Management System (QMS) for school-based educators.
“The work plan will serve as a performance agreement that will be signed by both the principal and his/her immediate supervisor (that is, the circuit manager),” Motshekga said.
Although a body comprising all the smaller education unions — the Combined Trade Union– Autonomous Teachers Union — and the basic education department had already signed the QMS collective agreement, “Sadtu still has not signed,” she said.
Motshekga added that the teacher union had placed a condition on embracing the agreement: that if teachers performed satisfactorily, their annual salary progression should be 1.5% instead of the 1% that is generally awarded. The minister said Sadtu was using the performance agreements as a bargaining tool to get the additional 0.5%.
However, the general secretary of Sadtu, Mugwena Maluleke, rubbished the claims, saying the 0.5% hike was not linked to the performance agreements of principals and was a separate issue.
He said the Quality Management System dealt with all teachers and had nothing to do with the specific performance contracts of principals, which he said was a new requirement by the department.
“Our position with the performance agreements of principals is very simple: we are saying bring the policy and table it in the ELRC [Education Labour Relations Council] … There was never a collective agreement. We heard about it in the media ourselves; it has never been put on the table,” Maluleke said.
The National Education Policy Act compelled the minister to consult with teacher unions, he said.
“All unions are in the very same position. We have not been consulted and therefore we cannot agree to something that is imposed on us.”
Maluleke added that, before individual principals could be asked to sign a performance contract, aspects such as the conditions of a school had to be looked at.
“If you are not going to give principals the tools to use so that they must be able to perform, how are you going to assess them? We said to them [that] we must not allow politicians to just impose things that they know is just about themselves. We are on the coalface; we are meeting the realities [in schools].”
Sadtu was open to negotiation but needed to be told what principals’ deliverables were, he said.
“We are saying: ‘Come to us and let’s negotiate a performance contract, as long as it has got deliverables from both sides. You give me things to deliver, then I will deliver.’ It has never come.”
Delays in competency assessments for principals — an ongoing battle — have also been blamed on the union. Competency assessments are believed to be one of the ways the department can overcome the challenges posed by improper appointments and jobs-for-sale scandals.
The Mail & Guardian has seen a report in which the department’s director for education management and governance, James Ndlebe, has appealed to director general Mathanzima Mweli to intervene.
The report — delivered on June 12 and titled Lack of Progress in the Implementation of Competency Assessments for School Principals — again puts Sadtu at the centre of opposing the implementation.
“The department has been engaging labour unions on the introduction of competency assessments for principals for some time now without success … We are now at a stage where the proposal of competency tests for principals has been rejected and removed from further discussions,” said Ndlebe.
Sadtu was “the dominating union in the rejection programme”, wrote Ndlebe.
Motshekga first mooted competency assessments for principals in 2011 and, in 2013, the Council of Education Ministers said the assessments could be implemented.
According to the department, the proposed assessments are in line with the National Development Plan’s calls to review the appointment procedure of principals to ensure that the right people are appointed for the job.
Ndlebe said there had been numerous consultations within the Education Labour Relations Council dating back to last August, with no resolution in sight. He asked Mweli to convene a meeting with union bosses to discuss the matter and to consider declaring policy on it.
Maluleke said the union agreed with the department that the appointment of principals needed to be reviewed. The current procedures were signed about 20 years ago and things had changed since then, he said. But he took issue with the department’s failure to consult unions before approving the competency assessments.
“With the competency assessments, they never came and sat down with us and said: ‘This is our plan and this is what informed it.’ We cannot now parachute something that we did not have any input on and understanding how it’s going to impact on principals.”
Maluleke accused the department of routinely pronouncing on matters without consulting unions, and of imposing decisions on them.
“If you are not going to give principals the tools to perform, how are you going to assess them?”