National SGB member urges for urgent education summit
ALEXANDRA – National SGB member urges for urgent education summit for Alex schools.
Parental involvement and effective School Governing Bodies (SGB) are urgently required to get Alex schools performing at their optimum.
This was the view of Milton Buthelezi of the National School Governing Bodies in response to this paper’s question on the delay in hosting an education summit of stakeholders, mooted last year and earlier this year, to explore challenges bedevilling local schools, such as poor performance and safety and security.
Buthelezi said the summit would also have assisted schools with strategies to improve performance in this year’s Grade 12 preliminary examinations, which have already started. The summit would have focused on security to prevent the theft of expensive computers and other electronic learning equipment; deal with burglaries plaguing school management; assess their assets and personnel security, as well as ensure dangerous weapons and illegal substances are not smuggled into schools.
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He said these challenges derived from the lack of policies and their implementation, SGB members’ lack of knowledge of their governance responsibility on policy, and strategy formulation, implementation and monitoring.
He stressed, “Most SGB members were only informed of but not trained on their roles, what and how to design and monitor policy implementation on finance, discipline and conduct, safety and security, curriculum delivery, maintenance, compliance and others.
“Without this knowledge, they can’t plan, implement anything, account to themselves, the school and community. Hence, theft, misconduct and poor performance will continue as a burden to the school management.”
He added that the members also can’t direct school patrollers on their safety roles, hence, children smoked freely in toilets and other secluded spots and girls felt unsafe on school premises.
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“[SGBs] are incapable [of engaging in] credible partnerships with security agencies on proactive patrols and reaction services or to install cameras to safeguard schools at night and weekends, leaving poorly equipped patrollers, most of whom are female, at the mercy of criminals, [and are left] to fix broken furniture and pot-holed floors, which are all budgeted for.”
He urged for the summit to be held urgently to support the SGBs to develop policies to, among others, deal with ill-discipline, truancy, fights and smuggling of weapons and illicit items like drugs into schools, to convene meetings prescribed for in educational policy and to account to the parents, who he criticised for reneging on their Constitutional obligation in their children’s education by failing to attend school meetings.
Buthelezi said, in some instances, SGB members resigned and were not replaced to quorate fully constituted structure for many years. This, he said, worked against the interests of the township children’s education.
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