‘No one must escape accountability’, says education MEC
“What went wrong?” This was the question asked by the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education MEC Kwazi Mshengu during the district’s accountability sessions held on Friday at the Education Department premises on Burger Street.
The sessions served to hold principals, circuit managers and chief education specialists of schools that performed below 40% to account for the under-performance of the schools under their leadership.
“We are all accountable for the results and the performance of the system as a whole. We are all engaged in the work of building the futures of these learners, from head office right down to schools.
Therefore, there must be no one who escapes accountability,” said Mshengu, adding that these sessions are part of what they call an academic improvement plan.
He said they realised the importance of everyone being held accountable for the results achieved last year and how they should improve.
“All of us are involved in a process of teaching and learning which is a core mandate of the department. Therefore, all of us must be accountable in whatever position one holds. If we are not accountable for the work we do then we will not achieve what we are about as the education department.”
Ugu district didn’t have a school that performed below 40% out of all 12 districts, whereas in uMgungundlovu, six schools performed below 40%.
“We don’t want to go back to the level of 0% pass rate in certain schools. Our target is for all our districts to perform above 80%. For us to get that right, we must get schools to perform. We will still meet with the schools that did well to ensure they don’t drop the standard,” he said.
Mshengu added that they are going to put monitoring mechanisms in place to ensure that what they discussed, and the implementation of the academic improvement plan, is implemented.
“Every month the district director will be reporting to an Exco meeting on [the developments] based on the academic improvement plan and accountability sessions. On a quarterly basis we are going to meet again with the principals of these schools just to assess if there is improvement or if there is more that still needs to be done,” said MEC.
He also urged parents to be interested in their children’s education. “[Parents] must know if their child arrived at school or not. Communities must stop disrupting schools. We don’t want [to hear about] schools being closed because of community protests.”
Head of Education Nkosinathi Ngcobo added that last year, they achieved their goal of eliminating 0% pass rate in schools; and this year, the focus will be on eliminating under-performance in schools.