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MEC challenged to implement solutions to mounting education crisis

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Dear MyPE

Parents are watching the future of their children dissolve in front of their eyes and they are taking to the streets in a desperate appeal to the Department of Education to hear their plight.

On Monday, 25 August some 40 schools in the northern areas of Port Elizabeth embarked on mass action which includes the closure of these schools by parents. These desperate acts are not limited to the metro, it has been happening throughout the province.

On behalf of the DA, I once again call on the MEC for Education, Mandla Makupula, as well as schools principals and teachers to be pro-active by implementing the following solutions:

  • Ensure that schools submit names of individuals with the appropriate qualifications and recommend them as suitable candidates for substantive vacant posts;
  • Motivate Afrikaans speaking teachers from English and Xhosa medium schools to avail themselves for absorption into the existing substantive vacant posts at our Afrikaans medium schools and simultaneously re-assign teachers to the posts that are left vacant through this absorption process;
  • Schools need advertise posts that have not been filled in newspapers and on the internet and from these applications they must identify suitable candidates for employment; these names must then be submitted to district offices as potential candidates for substantive vacant posts;
  • Permanently appoint the remainder of the Funza Lushaka Bursary Holders in substantive vacant posts.
  • Reallocation of work responsibilities so that opportunities are created for which teachers on the excess list may be reappointed; and
  • Rationalisation of small and unviable schools must be fast tracked especially in Afrikaans-speaking areas so that teachers are free to fill posts at other Afrikaans medium schools.

The DA calls on the MEC to implement these proposals. These are very workable solutions, given the financial constraints that the department has to operate under.

Regards
Edmund van Vuuren, MPL

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Port Elizabethan

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