Sometimes even Politicians are Pro-education

by Admin · June 21, 2015

Politicians tend to have a bad reputation when it comes to showing concern for the problems of the nation, but in the field of education KENNY?PASENSIE finds that there are engaged parliamentarians.

Learners at Dominican Convent School in Johannesburg at prayer. Even if many Church schools no longer have a mostly Catholic student body, the Catholic ethos these schools instil in their pupils represents an essential form of evangelisation, as several authors in this supplement point out.

The title of Thomas Hardy�s classic novel Far From the Madding Crowd often springs to mind when I attend the parliamentary meetings of the basic education portfolio committee� precisely because it is not as frenzied (the meaning of the word �madding�) as our country�s public political discourse.

It is less frenzied than the National Assembly. There are no men in white shirts, red overalls, chants of �pay back the money� or the occasional expletive that characterises the political theatre of parliament.

It is here that politicians from across the political spectrum sit shoulder to shoulder and stare down department officials, demanding answers to difficult questions. It is here that the real work of the legislature is being done.

As the education researcher and parliamentary liaison for the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office and the Catholic Institute of Education, I have been attending almost all of the parliamentary meetings of the basic education portfolio committee.

Although many may share the popular sentiment that nothing gets done at parliament, my experience has been to the contrary.

In fact I often leave a meeting thinking that despite the ideological differences of the political parties represented in the committee, the members have all one thing in common: the education of our country�s children, especially the poor rural children.

However, there are times that I leave the meetings with a feeling of frustration at the inability of the committee to be far more proactive in leading the way to finding solutions to the many challenges our education system is faced with.

Since the beginning of the year the committee has dealt with some contentious policy and legislative issues such as school infrastructure, scholar transport, school sport, teacher provisioning, learner wellness, and so on.

Some of these meetings were more interesting than others, such as the briefing the department gave on the draft scholar transport policy. The committee was to be briefed jointly by the Departments of Basic Education and Transport. However, before the meeting could get underway the Department of Transport was called away to another meeting.

That was just as well because the policy document they produced was lambasted by all as shoddy, littered with spelling errors and replete with drafting inconsistencies�and this was before the meeting got underway.

The chairperson immediately decided not to deal with the amateurish draft policy document. Unfortunately this left the basic education department officials to answer tough questions that should have been directed at the originators of the policy, namely the transport department.

What was clear, though, was that none of the members were happy with the draft policy that was more than two years in the making.

The portfolio committee members argued that while the two departments are fiddling with getting a workable policy on the table, learners in the rural areas are still walking vast distances to access their education.

On another occasion members took the department to task for its slow progress with its Accelerated Schools Infrastructure Delivery (ASIDI) programme.

This is the department of basic education�s flagship programme to eradicate the backlogs in school infrastructure, from the provisioning of basic sanitation and electricity to replacing mud schools.

However, the portfolio committee has criticised the department for its lack of progress. The veracity of the department�s ASIDI statistics was constantly challenged by the portfolio committee members who often accused the department of misrepresenting the progress of the programme.

What these meetings illustrate is that far from the madding crowd, the politicians who represent us do actually work to make better policies and legislation.

It does not mean that there is no political point-scoring going on in these meetings�it is just far less obvious.