Get rid of bad teachers - DA

2011-04-13 18:16

Cape Town - The education department should rid itself of teachers who are not capable of offering pupils a quality education, DA MP Wilmot James suggested on Wednesday.

"There is nothing more fundamental in education than having an excellent teacher in front of the class," he told MPs, speaking during debate on the department of basic education's R13.8bn Budget vote.

James said education was currently not lacking in resources; the issue was one of quality.

"The quality of education... outcomes has deteriorated. Observe, for example, the increasing need for bridging programmes at universities; of the increasing reluctance on the part of higher-education learning institutions to rely on normal admission standards."

James told Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga that it was not possible to accurately establish who the excellent teachers were because her department's data collectors were not doing their job properly.

Questions posed by him to the department, trying to establish how many teachers were qualified to teach the subjects they taught, had not received a response.

"Your department's data-collection division is run by rank amateurs. The data-collection machinery is not set up to answer the fundamental questions that must be answered in order to run a modern state ministry," he said.

James called for the introduction of performance-based pay for teachers, as well as the introduction of a subsidy allowing teachers to acquire the "tools of their trade", including computers and internet access.

"There are many very good and committed teachers working very hard, but we must acknowledge that there are very poor ones that ought to be managed out of the system.

"And many of the very poor ones came from the bantustan education system in the 1990s. We cannot... afford to have poor teachers miseducate the nation's children," he said.

- SAPA