Schools will now open on June 8 and not on Monday, June 1, the department of basic education said in a statement on Sunday evening. 

The statement came just over an hour after a briefing on the readiness of schools to reopen by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga was postponed to Monday morning. 

According to the statement, three reports — from the heads of education department committee, the National Education Collaboration Trust and Rand Water — said that a number of schools would not be ready to open on Monday even though progress had been made in preparing schools. Rand Water has not yet supplied water to 3 500 schools in the country. 

The reports were presented on Saturday at a meeting of the Council of Education Ministers, which is made up of the provincial education MECs. 

The meeting concluded, according to the statement, that teachers, non-teaching staff and the school management team should be the only people to report to school on Monday and that learners should only return on June 8.

“This whole coming week must be used for the proper orientation and training of teachers, the mapping and ramping of all supply chain matters, and final touches to the readiness of the teaching facility for the arrival of learners,” read the statement.

The statement further said learners who had already arrived at boarding schools must remain there and that the schools must continue to orientate them on health and safety procedures. 

Last week, MEC for education in Northern Cape Mac Jack announced that schools in that province would only open on June 8 and that teachers were expected to be back on June 3. 

But schools in the Western Cape will reopen on Monday (June1). On Sunday evening, Western Cape department of education MEC Debbie Schafer and Premier Alan Winde tweeted that schools in that province will open on Monday as per Motshekga’s directive. 

The province’s education department said in a statement that all measures were in place to enable learners to return to school on Monday and that it had spent R280-million on personal protective equipment. 

“Given these preparations, and the enormous effort put in by teachers and non-teaching staff alike, it would be unfair to delay all schools from re-opening,” read the statement, which was sent out about 10 minutes after the basic education department stated that schools will only open a week later. 

And at least one school in Eastern Cape, Nyanga High School, also tweeted on Sunday afternoon that tuition will commence on Monday (June 1).

Also on Sunday evening, the KwaZulu-Natal department of education said that MEC Kwazi Mshengu will visit schools in the Umgungundlovu district. 

On May 19, Motshekga announced that the Cabinet and the National Command Council had approved the reopening of schools and that a phased-in approach would be used, starting with grades seven and 12. 

The Mail & Guardian reported this week that in the coronavirus orientation guidelines for schools — a document the department released on its website — the phase-in system would happen in seven phases. The next grades to return to school will be grades six and 11, followed by grades five and 10, grades nine and four, grades eight and three, grades two and one and the last grade to return to school will be grade R. 

But, in a government gazette on Friday Motshekga announced that early childhood development, grades R, three, six, 10 and 11 and also schools of skills years two and three as well as grades one, two, three and six in schools for learners with severe intellectual disabilities (SID) will return to school on July 6.

On August 3, grades four, five, eight and nine along with grades four and five in SID schools will also go back to school. The gazette was silent on grades one and two. 

Five teacher unions, among them the South African Democratic Teachers Union, the National Teachers Union and the National Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa, have been consistently vocal about schools not being ready to open because they did not have systems in place to ensure the safety of teachers and learners. This week, school governing bodies added their voices to that of the unions. 

In Motshekga’s original announcement, teachers were to have reported for work on Monday, May 25, but in most provinces they did not. This was largely because many schools had not received personal protective equipment. A survey by the five unions, which was completed on May 29, revealed that in most provinces preparations were still underway and therefore schools were not ready to open on Monday. 

This follows a similar survey by the unions earlier in May, which concluded that there were still a lot of outstanding issues in schools to allow for their reopening. 

A joint statement by the five unions and school governing body associations said that besides schools having not received personal protective equipment, they had not received the amended curriculum and that the issue of teachers with comorbidities had not been properly addressed. 

“It is believed that the minister should retract her announcement to give the system more time to ready itself for a common re-opening, because, if not, we will see a haphazard re-opening situation,” read the joint statement. 

COMMENT

South African universities are faced with a strange pair of problems. On one hand, universities and the department of higher education and training (DHET) claim that the higher education system is seriously short of PhD-qualified academic staff.  Only about 35% of permanent academics have PhDs, though these are unevenly distributed among universities (Mouton et al, 2018) . Since only academics with PhDs can supervise new PhDs, there are also worries about how the academic profession is going to sustain itself in the long term.  Universities are being encouraged to think of “innovative strategies” to recruit PhD-qualified academics to fill this gap. 

But on the other hand, the universities already collectively host a few thousand postdoctoral fellows. These academics all have PhDs, and are required to conduct and publish academic research, but they are not university employees.  They receive relatively low, stagnant, “scholarships” instead of salaries, pay no tax, receive no benefits, have no job security, are not counted as staff for employment equity purposes, and are not guaranteed a permanent job once their fellowship is finished. They are often paid through postgraduate funding offices, and in some universities are referred to as postdoctoral “students” even though they are not registered for any degree. 

What are postdoctoral fellowships?  Ideally, they are temporary appointments that allow an academic who recently graduated with a PhD to spend time (two to three years) publishing their research with few or no teaching and administration responsibilities, before moving on to a permanent academic post. Universities typically claim that this arrangement benefits both the university and the fellow: the university benefits by having its research productivity bolstered by the fellow’s publications; and the newly-qualified PhD-holder benefits from a period of “mentored training” in which to develop their research skills, under the supervision of a senior academic host, in preparation for an academic career and a permanent university job. 

This ideal sounds great, but for a number of reasons the reality is often not so rosy.  First, there is no guarantee that academics in postdoctoral positions will find a permanent job after a convenient two to three years. Although some postdocs do find permanent work reasonably quickly, others have been in postdoctoral positions for six or seven years at one or more universities. And there does not appear to be any structured career progression plan by which postdocs are absorbed into the permanent academic staff in any university.  

In some ways, this mirrors patterns of academic casualisation in much of the Global North, where, in a collapsing permanent academic job market, postdoctoral fellowships and other kinds of insecure posts are absorbing the oversupply of PhD graduates who have no realistic chance of finding permanent academic work.  In South Africa, however, the reasons for offering postdoctoral fellowships are less clear, as most academics already in permanent posts don’t have PhDs. 

A second and related problem with the postdoctoral system in South Africa is that universities describe these fellowships as periods of “mentored training”, “apprenticeships”, “internships”, opportunities for “experiential learning”, and other similar language which presents fellows as perpetual learners. Whereas this superficially presents the universities as “helping to develop the academic pipeline”, in fact it undermines the professionalism of the work academics in postdoctoral positions do, as well as a sense of entitlement to appropriate remuneration for that work.  

When universities say they are doing academics a favour by giving them experience — which will supposedly pay off sometime later in making them competitive for a permanent job — this justifies cheap scholarships instead of salaries with benefits. It also obscures the way that postdoctoral fellowships and other forms of temporary work are helping to create the gap between finishing a PhD and getting a secure job, as much as they are now also claiming to fill that gap.  Presenting postdoctoral fellows as learners who need more preparation for a future academic career also overlooks how many postdocs have already established themselves as accomplished academics in the absence of secure university employment.  

If they are so short of PhD-qualified academics, why don’t universities then just hire all these postdoctoral fellows straight into permanent academic posts? Surely this is an obvious solution to all parties’ needs?  Or is it? Are university managers just being un-proactive about staffing plans, or are there really two different logics at work here, such that complaints about the shortage of PhD-qualified permanent staff do not acknowledge the ways that recruiting academics into non-permanent positions is actually being incentivised by other aspects of the higher education system?  

I have been in postdoctoral positions for three years now, and these questions have perplexed me for a long time.  Because I have never had a permanent university job, and so have never participated in any university decision-making forums where postdoctoral policies are made, the reasons suggested below are my best guesses, informed by much reading and discussion with colleagues. 

Part of the answer, surely, is that postdoctoral fellows are cheap for universities.  Postdocs stipends — on average about R200 000 a year — are significantly lower than an average entry-level lecturer salary, come with no benefits, and increase only once every several years.  If postdocs produce two journal articles a year, they will have more or less earned back their stipend in government subsidy.  

 The DHET runs a cash-for-papers system: the higher education budget is distributed among universities in return for how many academic publications each one produces in DHET-approved journals and presses.  In this way, academic publications have been turned into a form of currency which can be exchanged for real money. The value of an academic article varies from year to year according to the higher education budget, but is about R100 000. 

Beyond cost, however, there are other benefits to universities in having a significant fraction of their academic workforce outside of permanent employment.  It has been suggested that postdocs are being recruited to do research because permanent academics are too overworked with teaching and administration to do it themselves (Holley et al, 2018). Universities can plug this hole with postdoctoral fellows and other temporary academics who do the work not only for much cheaper, but in ways that make the university look better in formal measures of research output and employment equity.  DHET ranks South African universities by giving each one a “per capita” output score that is calculated by dividing its postgraduate graduations and total research publications by its number of permanent staff only.  

This is an incorrect understanding of “per capita”, which effectively erases the contribution of non-permanent academics.  The smaller the university’s permanent workforce, relative to its total research-producing population, the better its final score.  So when postdoctoral fellows  —  who are not university employees  —  publish journal articles in the name of the university they are affiliated with, the university benefits by increasing its research output (and possibly its income) while not increasing the numbers of permanent academics it employs.  The same applies to research published by students, temporary employees, and academics affiliated with departments but not employed by them: for ranking purposes, these authors are not counted. 

Universities are also under pressure to increase the number of black South African permanent academics they employ, because white South Africans are still highly overrepresented in the academic ranks. Again, postdocs explicitly do not count for employment equity purposes, which means that academics who are not members of designated groups are eligible for postdoctoral positions even when they would not be the preferred candidates for permanent academic posts.  

So postdoctoral fellowships enable universities to reap these academics’ publications, in exchange for government subsidy and/or a position in the rankings, while not needing to include them in the demographics of the permanent academic staff. Although universities often present postdoctoral fellowships as part of the “academic pipeline” by which the “next generation” of academics is being trained, this raises the major question of where universities expect these postdocs, who were not recruited with employment equity concerns in mind, to find employment after their fellowship is finished. 

All of this raises the question of how and why university priorities and mandates are being set in such a way that they are basically unachievable by the ordinary complement of academic staff members on standard conditions of employment.  Permanent academics have ballooning teaching, supervision and administration loads, partly as a consequence of dramatically increased class sizes over the past 10-15 years.  

Instead of addressing this by employing more permanent staff to improve the staff:student ratio, or changing research output targets to be more realistic, university decision-makers appear to be outsourcing part of the universities’ core work to a low-paid and insecure peripheral academic workforce, and engaging in competition for competition’s sake.  Again, postdoctoral fellows are not the only ones in this category; many others are doing lecturing and research work on various low-paid, fixed-term contracts. 

In this way, South African universities have become like a face with two mouths.  One mouth is worried about the shortage of PhD-qualified permanent academics, and wonders how this gap is going to be filled in the long term. The other mouth describes postdoctoral fellows as learners, trainees, interns and apprentices, and seems to have little intention of employing them, while reaping the benefits of their highly skilled work.  This bifurcated system, where everyone works but only some are visible or counted in official measures, is creating a politics of appearances, where surface measures of success (e.g. a higher position in the rankings) have become more important than the conditions of the people actually doing the work. This is the upshot of instrumentalising academic work (Harley, 2017) — that is, giving it an exchange value which has nothing to do with the value that it had for the person who originally produced it. 

Postdoctoral fellows are highly skilled academics, yet many have lost hope of ever finding secure work in South African universities.  In a system which claims to need more PhDs, this seems a bizarre waste of the years of university education that have already been invested in them.  Universities and DHET should think carefully about the perverse incentives that are encouraging the proliferation of insecure fellowships and short contracts, which are undermining the attractiveness of the academic profession and turning universities into exploitative organisations. 

Philippa Kerr is an associate professor of psychology working on a six-month contract at the University of Oslo in Norway. Before that, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Free State. She plans to return to South Africa to begin a new postdoctoral fellowship later in 2020 and writes in her personal capacity

COMMENT

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought into question the future direction in local government systems and practices. Specifically, it has presented an opportunity to reassess the participation of vulnerable communities in local government decision-making. Undoubtedly, poor participation of certain groups or communities in decision-making leads to a disconnect between the services provided and needs of people. 

This new focus evokes the imperative for considering alternative mechanisms of participation to complement the traditional local government processes, such as integrated development planning and municipal budgeting. Within this larger need for fundamental change sits poor service delivery — water, electricity, sanitation and waste management — in informal settlements. 

It is generally agreed that local government has the mandate to bring the government closer to people, deliver services in an equitable and efficient manner and meet the needs of citizens. This suggests greater inclusion of marginalised groups in decision-making and in accessing quality services, but reality shows a different picture. Professor Marie Huchzermeyer’s research on informal settlements and the right to the city unveils the discrepancy in services.  

Similarly, the United Nations’ report on the 2018 Review of SDGs implementation reveals that Goal 11 which prioritises inclusivity, safety and sustainability, is still not realised. Not to mention Indicator 11.3 which  seeks to enhance inclusivity and participatory planning by 2030. The report underlines that many regions still struggle to improve public participation mechanisms (it applies to local government) and that so far only Eastern and South-Eastern Asia show real improvement, followed by Australia. Of course, other regions such as Europe and North America are also considered to have fared better.  

Despite the fact that there is scant evidence showing the extent to which African citizens influence policy decisions, many studies reveal poor participation of citizens. Professor Steven Friedman shines light on this discrepancy in his book Power in action: democracy, citizenship and social justice. He observes that only few people collectively influence decision-making hence, “elites create the state in their image, making it serve their own needs”. This suggests exclusion of vulnerable people and highlights the need to improve participation mechanisms and give a voice to those whose plight is currently heightened by Covid-19. 

In South Africa, local government has generally been labelled as weak and inefficient, despite progressive policy and legislative framework, such as the Constitution and the Local Government Municipal Systems Act 2003, informing public participation. Many researchers have revealed the disjuncture between progressive policies, processes and their implementation. For instance Alison Todes and others in their publication Including women? Disjuncture between voice, policy and implementation in integrated planning assert that integrated development plans (IDPs) have not necessarily served as an effective space for marginalised groups to meaningfully participate in formulating plans and influencing development practice.

Planact, a non-profit organisation promoting inclusive local governance processes, has witnessed institutionalised spaces of engagement as ineffective or poorly utilised. A recent study further reveals the gap in community participation.  Consequently, all too often residents have reverted to protests to amplify their voice regarding services they need. Municipal IQ which offers municipal assessments observes that there were 218 recorded service delivery protests across South African municipalities in 2018. These protests are often characterised by violent behaviour stemming from the exclusion from local government decisions.

It can be argued that the ongoing exclusion in decision-making has contributed to the present urgency for access to basic services, such as water and sanitation — residents in informal settlements struggle  to adhere to the health measures, such as frequent hand washing, necessary to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Furthermore, high-population densities and sharing of facilities by multiple households render physical distancing impossible and increase residents’ risk of exposure to contaminated surfaces. These challenges make rethinking of local government participation mechanisms even more pressing. 

The recent speech by President Cyril Ramaphosa provides a pointer to the government’s willingness to embrace systemic change in the near future: “Our new economy must be founded on fairness, empowerment, justice and equality. It must use every resource, every capability and every innovation — service of the people of this country.” This is a positive statement and Planact considers the call an important one for all spheres of government and civil society. Reimagined participation mechanisms are integral to that change.

How can participation in local government be improved?

Planact advocates selected alternatives municipalities can adopt to improve the participation of informal settlements in local government.

First, supporting informal settlement clusters to participate in local governance processes. This could amplify their voices and reduce the elite’s dominance in decision-making processes. 

Second, supporting the creation of neutral spaces/alternative spaces where the clusters and other movements can communicate with the municipality. This could complement the quick consultations conducted during IDP/municipal budgeting processes which least benefit vulnerable communities. As asserted by institutional theorists, such as Douglass North, informal rules should be supported to engender formal institutions. 

Third, providing elaborative feedback sessions with informal settlement clusters at different intervals of a year. The current feedback on the coronavirus situation provided by the government points to the feasibility and significant role of feedback sessions in governance.

Fourth, recognising and institutionalising social audits to establish relationships between service delivery and resources meanwhile also promoting the monitoring of service providers by communities. 

The monitoring of basic services by residents of informal settlements, the Asivikelane Initiative, demonstrates this aspect.

Lastly, strengthening public awareness campaigns  using media that includes community radio stations to encourage the inclusion of disadvantaged communities. 

What does systemic change mean for civil society organisations?

Currently, the government is speaking to civil society organisations to help them address the problems faced by informal settlements during this pandemic. Although the focus is mainly on pressing issues, this has paved the way to strategically influence future actions. Planact is cognisant that systemic change regarding participation mechanisms at local government level will require strategic advocacy through targeted interventions. A pressing question that cannot be ignored is whether the various government departments and municipalities will retain the current momentum in addressing service delivery issues and collaboration with civil society organisations post-Covid-19? 

Non-governmental organisations therefore will need to carefully strategise their interventions aimed at bolstering the government’s response to the issues beyond this period. A coalition of non-governmental organisations and stakeholders needs to capitalise on the government’s current willingness to embrace systemic change as reflected in the president’s statement. To this end, NGOs need to re-engineer their advocacy approach for the Post-Covid 19 era, while also looking inward and solidifying collaborative interventions. 

A first critical move would be the discarding of the silo approach, which has a long track record of failing to catalyse significant systemic change.

The active involvement of all stakeholders is critical for shifting the stifling systems that continue to exclude vulnerable communities. If grasped, systemic change in the post-Covid-19 era could benefit the majority of residents in informal settlements in South Africa, thus resulting in the country becoming a cynosure for best public-participation practices. 

Dr Hloniphile Simelane is a development practitioner at Planact. She is also a visiting researcher at the University of Witwatersrand’s School of Architecture and Planning

South Africa has been in level 5 and level 4 lockdown for about 70 days now and most of us have settled in a work-from-home routine. It wasn’t easy but just look at us.

Most employees adjusted to working with having kids, pets and partners around; we’ve overcome erratic Wi-Fi connections, power outages and a thousand other challenges.

While many initially planned for a short term work-from-home routine, it’s now becoming clear that we may have to continue like this for some time to come.

It’s about time we take our work-from-home skills to the next level, let’s call it WFH 2.0. Google suggests following these suggestions to master this WFH business.

WFH 2.0: Getting things done

Use Google Groups to stay in touch

An email list that includes all your team members lets you quickly share information, and a chat room can be used for faster-moving discussions. It’s super easy to create an email list.

Use Google Groups to create an online group for your team, which will enable you to email each other, host group discussions, collaborate on projects, organise meetings find people with similar hobbies.

Google Drive: Sharing permissions

Update sharing permissions on important documents to ensure that collaborators can easily edit and comment as needed. A document can be shared for collaboration with up to 100 people.

Take this one step further by creating a shared drive where your team can store, search, and access files from any device. From Google Drive, simply click on the ‘New’ button. You can also change member access levels, or remove certain members.

Practising good workplace etiquette

Just because your team isn’t at the office doesn’t mean they’re not busy. It’s always a good idea to check calendars before scheduling meetings. You can read more about accessing someone’s calendar here.

You can also set up working hours in Calendar to inform your co-workers of your own availability. Simply go to Settings, then General and select Working Hours. From there, select Enable Working Hours and select the days and time.

Schedule meetings now

Set up calendar invites, create an agenda ahead of time. Simply go to your Google Calendar to create events, or sync invites straight from the email or third-party application.

You can also attach relevant docs to the invite from withing the Calendar before sharing it with all relevant parents. If anyone isn’t familiar with video conferencing, simply point them to Google’s how-to guide.

This is a useful feature because if a team member tries to schedule a meeting with you outside of your working hours, they’ll receive a warning notification.

Find the right set-up for you

You might need to try a few different configurations before you discover how to stay focused and not distract others. I’ve personally come to rely integrations with Google Calendar (such as Monday, Trello and ToDoist) to stay on top of things.

If, like me, you’re not all that fond of video calls and conferencing, Google’s blog post with six useful tips might just be the thing you need to take you from video-call-hesitant to video-call-pro.

If you need some help settling in with WFH 1.0, follow this link to learn about sticking to a work schedule, finding the right spot for your home office and how not to be the “just quickly” person.

The on-again, off-again communication skills of the Education Department have tried and tested the patience of many South Africans on Sunday – but we’ve finally got an answer to a burning question, and it’s better late than never. Schools in Mzansi will not open on Monday 1 June as initially planned, the ministry has confirmed.

A press conference scheduled for Sunday was cancelled at the last minute, and there was a vacuum of information about when children would be asked to return to school. The briefing was meant to clarify this issue before it disappeared from the night’s schedule.

When will children return to school in South Africa, and on what date?

The postponed briefing has been pushed back to 11:00 on Monday – hours after schools were due to return for their first day. Luckily, some form of common sense prevailed and on Sunday evening, the Education Department gave us all an update. Schools will remain closed for the week ahead, reopening only on Monday 8 June.

Apart from the change in dates, it’s likely that most of the plans set down by Angie Motshekga and her colleagues will remain in place. Grade 7 and Grade 12 students will be the first back through the doors in eight days’ time, and they will be followed by different year groups as the weeks roll on.

Elijah Mhlanga is a spokesperson for the education department. He confirmed that schools are “80% ready” for reopening, but not all facilities are prepared to move forward together this week.

“We received a report from the consortium of service providers coordinated by the National Education Collaboration Trust on the external evaluation and monitoring of the state of readiness. Rand Water, as an implementing agent delivering water to 3,500 schools, also presented its report.”

“The Heads of Education Departments Committee also presented a summary. All three reports converged on the fact that a substantial number of schools would not be ready for the reopening tomorrow, albeit tremendous progress had been made by most provinces, which overall reflected 80% state of readiness.”

Elijah Mhlanga

From the @DBE_SA pic.twitter.com/bz9FAaSVlP

— Elijah Mhlanga (@ElijahMhlanga) May 31, 2020