Department of education not targeting Afrikaans schools in Gauteng

The Constitutional Court ruled in favour of Fedsas, stating that public schools may determine their own language and admissions policies.

Fedsas also warns the Gauteng education officials that if they ignore the court order, they will suffer the consequences.

Threats of audits of staff and learner composition of some schools in Gauteng are being investigated after it became apparent that education officials are apparently ignoring an urgent court order that was granted last week.

“The court order is not only against the MEC, but against the entire Gauteng education department,” says Paul Colditz, CEO of Fedsas.

“In other words, any official could be found guilty of contempt of court should the court order be ignored,” he explains.

Phumla Sekhonyane, spokesman for the department says, “We wish to correct public pronouncements that the MEC and department have made decisions to convert Afrikaans medium schools to parallel medium schools.”

“This is simply untrue,” she states.

The conversion of single medium schools (regardless of language) to parallel medium schools is merely one of the proposed options to address under-resourced schools under the re-organisations of schools (ROS) framework, which the department approved on March 19, as part of its five year strategic framework for 2014 to 2019.

In Gauteng, there are about 516 schools that perform below average on infrastructure utilisation, cost-effectiveness and learner outcomes.

These schools constitute 20% of all the Gauteng public schools and are prime candidates for resource optimisation.

“There are 22 small schools with fewer than 200 learners in the schools and these schools are largely under-utilised with excess classroom capacity and these schools tend to teach multiple grades in the same classroom at the same time.”

Of these schools, 73% are located in townships.

These schools have high fixed costs and they also have multiple grades teaching in one class, which is inefficient.

There are 303 schools which are under-subscribed, having more than 300 free classroom seats.

“Around 20% of these under-subscribed schools are Afrikaans-medium (single-medium) schools that could possibly be converted into parallel-medium schools with instruction in both Afrikaans and English to increase learner enrollment.”

Where schools are under-utilised because they are single medium schools, such schools could be converted into parallel medium schools.

Parallel medium schools are schools that offer more than two mediums of instruction.

“In Primary Schools, we have schools that offer isiZulu and Tshivenda and in these schools, learners who speak isiZulu sit in one classroom and those who speak Tshivenda will sit in another classroom being taught by teachers of the same language group.”

In high schools, where parallel medium has been introduced in Afrikaans schools, there are separate classes for each grade based on the language, one for Afrikaans and one for English.

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