Education MEC Senzo Mchunu has warned that he is intolerant of inefficiency.
|||“Intolerant of inefficiency”, Education MEC Senzo Mchunu warned on Thursday that this would be the year in which school principals and teachers felt the crack of the whip from the department’s 2012 Programme of Action.
The programme – including performance indicators and targets with time frames – will be distributed to all education stakeholders, including parents, as a blueprint to provide oversight and hold education employees accountable.
At the launch of the document, described as an “instruction” on performance rather than a “negotiating tool”, it was also announced that an agreement had been reached with unions to end financially draining teacher displacement, and to expedite the axing of negligent principals who sometimes remained suspended for months.
About 900 teachers have been displaced because of violence and intimidation. Ten principals face the chop.
Mchunu said that for various reasons many staff asked to be declared as displaced, and were moved from their allocated school to one that often had enough teachers.
In some cases staff wanted to move because communities had become angry with them for not performing their duties.
“Now we want to ban all those things… They must just remain until we resolve the problem,” he said.
Speaking about principals, Mchunu said a few simply didn’t show up for work, or spent the school day sipping beer.
“There’s been a tendency… where a principal would for four years not produce anything in terms of matric results above 20 percent, and that principal would never be touched… no evidence of teachers teaching and learners learning… These are the key areas of accountability we are now demanding.”
He said the department would provide support to principals whose schools underperformed because of circumstances beyond their control. - The Mercury