The provincial Department of Education in conjunction with the Department of Safety and Security recently held a safety summit at Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg to address issues of violence and safety in schools.
The aim of the summit was to determine whether current policies were effective, to develop safety strategies that enhance safety measures at schools and to identify factors and triggers that contribute to crime and violence. The event attended by political heads of the two departments, school governing bodies, principals and various other stakeholders also aimed to evaluate how the criminal justice system and other stakeholders can respond to incidents of violence.
Since the beginning of this year alone, about seven cases of safety and violence in schools have been recorded. A researcher at Equal Education, Stacey Jacobs said there was no silver bullet solution to school violence and reducing or eradicating it would require strong coordination and political will across all the relevant departments. She said summits and dialogues which bring different stakeholders together are a positive way to engage and draw on the expertise and experiences of different role players.
She added that interventions must include systems to streamline responses to immediate safety threats, but also provide more long-term focused preventative measures. “It is imperative that learners who demonstrate behavioural challenges or face social challenges are identified early. They should have access to professional psychosocial support at the school-level or refer to a professional. Schools should offer programmes to all learners that capacitate them with the crucial skills needed to handle conflict in a constructive way,” said Jacobs.
Media liaison for the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) Nomusa Cembi echoed Jacob’s sentiments and added that psychosocial services should also be offered to teachers in instances of violence against teachers.
“We need these services in schools to address the violent behaviour of learners amongst each other and against teachers. Safety should also go beyond looking after the infrastructure. Schools have security guards but they are there for the safety of the buildings and not for the violence that occurs in schools. Having police officers in schools would be a positive gesture but there aren’t enough officers to be deployed in schools,” said Cembi.
Furthermore, Jacobs said there also needs to be effective implementation of policies and initiatives that speak to school violence at the school, community, district and government level. “While the Department of Basic Education SAPS Protocol signed in 2011 allowed for searches and seizures at identified hotspot schools to address the presence of drugs and weapons, research findings about police deployment in schools is contentious. The interventions for hotspots developed by the protocol includes periodic policing patrols – morning, midday and after school,” she said.
Both Jacobs and Cembi expressed that the problems of violence in schools were a reflection of social ills that plaque the community. “Accessibility to alcohol and narcotics has been found to influence the level of violence at schools. Furthermore, exposure to violence at home such as domestic violence or in the community in the form of gangsterism has been shown to contribute to violence at schools. Without the effective implementation of after-school programmes and extramural activities that give learners the opportunity to use their spare time productively, learners remain vulnerable to gangsterism and perpetual cycles of violence,” added Jacobs.
A the conclusion of the summit, MEC for Education Panyaza Lesufi and MEC for Safety and Security Sizakele Nkosi-Malobane adopted the Birchwood Programme of Action for School Safety which highlighted the practical resolutions developed by the summit’s secretariat that will be monitored over time.
What other solutions do you think should be implemented to end violence in school?
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