Provincial chairpersons to visit schools across SA to mark the start of the academic year and highlight potential of quality education
16 January 2024
ActionSA Provincial Chairpersons will, this week, start visiting schools and educational centres across South Africa to highlight the difference an ActionSA government can make to improve educational outcomes, to conduct oversight visits of school infrastructure and readiness in an effort to assist pupils and students with the commencement of the academic year.
ActionSA believes poor education is a crime against South African children as education offers one of the best opportunities for people to lift themselves out of poverty and attain better opportunities for a better life.
Weak institutions, undue influence from unions, teachers with limited knowledge and skills and squandered learning time have resulted in poor educational outcomes. These problems are far more pronounced in historically disadvantaged communities and rural areas, leaving millions of young South Africans locked out of the economy and trapped in a cycle of poverty and unemployment.
This is why, once elected to government, ActionSA’s ground-breaking Education Policy will ensure that all children in South Africa have access to quality education by, among other things:
Expanding support for Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres;
Ending the stranglehold of unions- specifically SADTU- over our schools; and
Reinstating school inspectors to ensure that quality teaching takes place.
In the weeks ahead, ActionSA Provincial Chairpersons and Premier Candidates in all nine provinces will visit educational centres to highlight the difference ActionSA can make once elected to govern. ActionSA Gauteng Chairperson, Funzi Ngobeni, will visits Mayibuye Primary School in Ekurhuleni, which was constructed at a cost of R85 million, but lies empty seven years later. Our KwaZulu-Natal Premier Candidate, Zwakele Mncwango, will embark on an oversight visit to ECD centres in Pietermaritzburg and in the Northern Cape, our Premier Candidate, Andrew Louw, will visit five schools in Kimberley to assess their readiness for the academic year.
In the Western Cape, Provincial Chairperson, Michelle Wasserman, will meet with Equal Education over the issues plaguing the fair and equitable access to education in the province. In Mpumalanga Provincial Chairperson, Thoko Mashiane, will visit the Mkhondo District Education Offices to address issues faced by parents attempting to register students while Free State Provincial Chairperson, Patricia Kopane, will visits Kagisano Combined School where a teacher was previously stabbed to see if security measures have improved. In the Eastern Cape, our Provincial Chairperson, Athol Trollip, will visit eight schools across the province highlighting a number of successes and challenges faced by some of the schools in one of the most rural provinces.
Our Youth Forum and Student Forum have already done fantastic work to highlight the ongoing corruption at the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and will continue to assist students’ country-wide as we fast approach the commencement of the tertiary academic year.
Quality education remains one of the key tools for individuals to empower themselves and leave behind a life of poverty.
ActionSA is committed to giving as many South Africans access to quality education as possible by removing the ruling party out of government, ending corruption within the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and improving teaching outcomes nationwide.
Issued by Herman Mashaba, ActionSA President, 16 January 2024
