The Minister of Basic Education, Mrs. Angie Motshekga, has said that both short-term and long term policy changes to teaching and learning will be implemented. These include:

The Outcomes Based Education model that was adopted by the new Government in the late 1990s received much criticism and was often cited as the explanation for poor schooling in South Africa. Now that changes have been brought to the curriculum, there is an expectation that these alone may improve the quality of education in our schools. Data published by the Institute in a Fast Facts report this month suggests that this may not, however, be the case.

Cabinet has now given the go-ahead for the Department of Higher Education & Training to begin the process of amending the Constitution (Schedule 4) so that control over the 53 Further Education & Training (FET) Colleges can move from the provinces to national government. The reason for this move apparently is to improve governance, administration and admission strategies for this important sector of our higher education landscape.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) is of the view that it is grave error to undermine our carefully considered provincial system of education. Provincial staff is much closer to the ground and has the capacity and personal connectedness to support colleges. The National Department does not have the capacity to support so many colleges, in fact it lacks capacity to deal with our 23 universities.

The bureaucratic centralisation of the FET colleges has fundamentally to do with the ANC's drive to centralise control over everything that moves. It is misguided and suffocating. Fix the FET college governance and administration problems. Improve the efficiency of spending. Improve the quality of education. All of these important things can be done without centralisation. It is much better and wiser to reform and improve the existing arrangement.

I have also repeatedly made the argument that Minister Blade Nzimande does not have the money to do what is far more important than centralisation, which is fund the expansion of FET enrolment from the current figure of 125,000 to a million students by 2015. Without the funds he will get nowhere. By centralising he expands his empire for no purpose other than his desire for more and more control rather than the improvement of the nation's education.

Recently the provincial education department in the Eastern Cape stated that it would be auditing former ‘Model C’ schools in the province because these schools had ‘too many luxuries’, and were allegedly refusing to comply with the provincial department’s policies. In a meeting at the provincial legislature in Bhisho in April, the portfolio chairman on education in the province, Mr Mzoleli Mrara, said that ‘Model C’ schools were ‘racist’ and used the country’s courts to win battles against the provincial education department. However, analysing the 2009 matric results in ‘Model C’ schools around South Africa would seem to indicate that they are one of the few centres of excellence in our public education system.

The Institute analysed results in schools formerly administered by the House of Assembly (HoA).   This was the whites-only chamber in the tricameral Parliament which South Africa experimented with between 1984 and 1994. Schools for coloured pupils were administered by the House of Representatives, and Indian schools by the House of Delegates. Schools for black pupils were controlled by either the Department of Education and Training or the various homeland Governments.

The term ‘Model C’ is not an official one used by the Department of Education. It has however, become part of the South African vernacular to describe many of the schools that were formerly administered by the HoA, and were therefore, formerly whites-only schools. For the purposes of this article ‘Model C’ is the term that will be used to describe schools that fell under the jurisdiction of the House of Assembly during apartheid. An analysis of the results broken down by race shows that pupils, especially African pupils, fare significantly better in ‘Model C’ schools than in other Government schools.

PARLIAMENT (Sapa) - Universities are not producing the kinds of graduates the country needs to fight poverty and unemployment, Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande said on Thursday.

"We need our universities to teach different views and perspectives," Nzimande told Parliament's portfolio committee on education in reply to debate on his budget speech.

"We are battling at the moment now. The kinds of economists that are being produced by most of our universities, they cant even spell the word developmental, yet we are saying want to have a developmental state.

"We have to intervene to say 'what are our universities doing to assist us to produce the kind of graduate that is needed to fight poverty and unemployment?'."

He said many of the graduates who left South Africa did so because it was "as if we are training them for the London stock exchange or the New York stock exchange, and not for the realities which are facing Empangeni and the rural areas".

Committee chairman Marius Fransman said he was concerned that a number of engineers were able to get financial support through the taxpayer base, but then moved to the United Kingdom and Canada.

"We can't stop a movement in the global environment, but what we should focus on is some of that patriotic responsibility in education.

"How do we educate in ensuring that people plough back?"

Originally published by Politicsweb