Eastern Cape Education MEC Mahlubandile Qwase believes the appointment of a new head for his department will bring about stability.
Eastern Cape Education MEC Mahlubandile Qwase believes the appointment of a new head for his department will bring about stability.
In an interview with Grocott's Mail during the official opening cocktail party of the Rhodes University's library on Thursday night, Qwase said the newly-appointed Superintendent General advocate, Modidima Mannya, will also oversee the department's transformation agenda towards 2011.
This week Mannya took over from Ronnie Swartz, who was at the helm of the embattled department in an acting capacity for a few months. Qwase said that the department is eager to work with Mannya. He added that Mannya was chosen based on his record of success in leading the department’s improvement and reform efforts.
Mannya is expected to work collaboratively with the department’s top leadership to provide focused support to help meet the department’s immediate goals. Such goals include the delivery of Learner Teacher Support Material, infrastructure roll-out in schools and to ensure the transfer of funds to schools before the end of November this year.
However, Qwase confirmed that there are still vacancies in the department's senior management such as cluster chief directors, which have not been filled. He added that while job interviews were held last week to appoint the head of finance, the selection has yet to happen.
The post of the deputy director-general for planning is also vacant. Qwase also said that the province is aiming for a 60% matric pass rate as all the provinces which obtained a pass rate which is below the national average of 60,7% were told by Basic Education Minister, Angie Motsekga during the last education Minmec meeting to "pull their socks up."
Minmec is a periodical meeting between national ministers and their corresponding provincial MECs. "Since the beginning of the year we have put in a lot of effort, we started very early in January and worked until the end of the June holidays," Qwase said.
He added that they also worked with Avusa which published questions and answers for certain subjects such as Pure Maths, Maths Literacy, Life Sciences, and so on. "In June we had a winter school with 496 under-performing schools which have 41 000 learners. We used the winter school to finish the syllabus," he said.
He added that there were negotiations at a national level for universities to take into consideration the fact that some schools did not write the mandatory preliminary examinations but that other universities consider applications based on June examinations. He also confirmed that some learners told him that they were adversely affected by the public sector strike.
