Education is the Premier's top priority, because quality education is the cornerstone of the opportunity society, said Premier Helen Zille today (Friday, 19 February 2010).

Delivering her State of the Province address in the provincial legislature today, Premier Zille said that any plan to develop skills will only succeed "if we can produce enough school-leavers who can read, write and calculate at the required level to enter the economy".

Premier Zille commented as follows on education in her address:

At the moment, the school system is not working. The grade 12 pass rate in the Western Cape, while higher than other provinces, has dropped by ten percentage points since 2004 to 76%.

In 2009, the percentage of Grade 3 learners in the province with adequate literacy skills was 53%, and for numeracy only 35%. Only 14% of grade 6 learners have the required numeracy skills.

We cannot go on like this.

Quality education is the cornerstone of the opportunity society. Expanding access to a quality education for all is the best affirmative action there is.

This is why education is my top priority in the province. In November last year we announced our strategic plan to improve education outcomes. It sets bold targets for improvements in literacy and numeracy, grade 12 results and measures to improve the results of under-performing schools.

This year, we want to reverse the decline in the grade 12 pass rate. We have set the seemingly impossible target of 80% -- an increase of almost five percentage points, a jump that has never been achieved before. It will be extremely difficult, we have set the benchmark very high, but we have to make an extreme effort in these extreme circumstances.

By 2019, we are aiming for a grade 12 pass rate of 87%, literacy levels of 90% and numeracy levels of 80%. In the next five years we aim to reduce the number of underperforming high schools from 85 to zero.

These are what you call stretch targets, given where we are starting from. But unless we get education right, the vision of the opportunity society FOR ALL is worthless.

How do we plan to achieve these targets?

We must start with the crucial first three years of schooling, the foundation phase.

We are regularly conducting independent diagnostic tests to measure the literacy and numeracy of all grade 3, 6 and 9 learners which enables us to identify where the problems are and what remedial action is required.

Literacy and numeracy tests were, in fact, first introduced by the previous DA provincial government. We are pleased that the tests are set to become part of national education policy as announced both by President Zuma in this State of the Nation address, and by Minister Pravin Gordhan in his budget speech. (We warmly welcome this growing trend of the National government taking over DA policies).

Speaker, we realise that policy-making and target-setting on their own will not achieve results. We know that turning our education system around depends on every principal, teacher, official, parent and pupil in our province.

Parents have a particular role to play - many children from disadvantaged backgrounds do succeed against the odds because of a stable and supportive home environment. But, while we cannot make parents accountable for their children's performance, we can certainly ensure that principals and teachers are.

As announced at the end of last year, we are in the process of directly linking the performance contracts of principals and officials to learner outcomes. And we are aiming to go further than this.

Later this month, a draft bill to amend the Western Cape Education Act will be sent to Cabinet for approval. This legislation will, amongst other things, give provincial government greater powers to conduct school inspections and to directly assess teacher performance in the classroom, where it counts.

Another prong of our education plan is to address the infrastructure backlogs that result in school overcrowding and a lack of learner resources.

Soon, tenders will be advertised to build 12 new schools and 200 new classrooms at 50 schools, starting in 2011. A priority list for the allocation of 126 additional mobile classrooms to help alleviate overcrowding will be finalised by the end of February, with delivery of the new classrooms to begin in March.

An important part of this infrastructure plan is to create four Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or STEM centres of excellence, advancing the vision that we started under the brief DA tenure of 1999 to 2001. We are incorporating the Cape Academy in Tokai and the Centre of Science and Technology in Khayelitsha into the STEM programme and we will establish two new STEM centres in disadvantaged communities.

These schools will be managed along the lines of a public benefit school. They will remain state schools, but have greater freedom and autonomy, amongst other things, to reward teachers for good performance and remove teachers who don't perform.

This initiative underscores our entire approach to education. We believe that the better a school's performance, measured by the literacy and numeracy of their pupils, the less the state should interfere.

Accordingly, we have informed the principals of the 167 schools that achieved a 90% or more grade 12 pass rate last year that we will not bother them unless they request assistance. I would like to thank these outstanding teachers and principals, they deliver greater value for money, in my view, than any other category of professional in the country. They don't need interference from officials.

We prefer to focus maximum attention and resources on schools and learners that under-perform, establish the reasons, and help them overcome them.

We are also placing special emphasis on providing better educational opportunities to learners with special needs. This means, in some cases, integrating classes. We will do so by increasing the number of full-service schools from 68 to 100 by the end of next year.

But our 73 dedicated "special needs" schools remain integral to our plan and we will draw on their expertise to assist non-special needs schools. 48 additional staff posts, including therapists, psychologists and learning support teachers have already been allocated for this purpose.

The province is also leading the development of a draft curriculum for sign language. This curriculum will be piloted for Grades 1-9 in 2010, with work underway on the draft curriculum for Grades 10-12.

None of the components of our education plan will succeed without the full support of learners, parents, educators, school governing bodies and the trade unions. I appeal to all of these role-players to work as a team to turn around education in our country. None of us, anywhere in South Africa, can be confident of the future if we cannot get education right.

For the full text of the Premier's speech, click here  (Acrobat document: opens in a new window).

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