It just won't be the same down at the pool again

Now's the time to bring out my bounce shot, I thought. It was in a big game for the Johannesburg Otters third team against Zoo Lake.

So I let loose. The ball plugged in the water, if that's possible, and drifted into the back of the head of a team mate who was was ponderously making his way, head down, into the hole. "Wait until I'm ready before you pass," he screamed at me.

The man on the break was Webby, the legendary Brian Webster in his later playing days and 40 years of service to the game of water polo and influence rubbed off onto thousands of youngsters lay ahead.

He was teaching at St David's at the time and I was running Transvaal Schools water polo. We got him on board as a coach, it must have been in the early 80s, and nothing was the same again. A razor sharp wit, an unbelievably sarcastic tongue and a complete inability to suffer fools gladly are what I remember, and what I continued to come across, as I drifted in and out of his considerable presence down the years.

He taught at King Edward School for a number of years and in that time they became the top polo school in the land - there's always heaps of talent among those boys, and his rough and ready style suited the sort of culture you get in that type of boys schools.

From there he went to St Stithians where he was as successful, in a different setting. He re-invented himself as a girls water polo coach at some stage and was instrumental in the development of the game into the fastest growing girls sport in schools in the country.

He eventually stepped down from senior coaching and took junior teams at Saints that hardly ever lost. He remained in charge there, though, and together with his wife Bridget, he invented and initially ran the Saints Invitational tournament that others are getting the credit for these days.

At the same time, he stayed involved at a provincial schools level. He ran Gauteng schools polo and expertly organised the SA Schools Championships when asked to. He also ran the club based at Saints and in the holidays he ran coaching clinics and took teams on overseas tours.

Yesterday I saw a Facebook post announcing that it was his last day in Gauteng polo - at a club game, I guess. Bridget is going to teach at a prestigious girls school in Grahamstown and Webby is tagging along. "I'm going to run the tuckshop, and probably coach some polo," he told me.

I bet he will be. But more than that, Grahamstown is going to get the Webby treatment. It will never be the same again, poolside, for them.

Brian Webster was a constant, sometimes disruptive, presence wherever water polo was being played in this town for so many years. The kids will be poorer for his leaving. I will miss him.

Expanding school feeder zones is putting a band aid on a bullet wound

The state of our educational system is the greatest obstacle in the way of a prosperous, equitable future for all South Africans.

The ratio 5000:25000 is one frequently quoted. There are 25 000 schools in South Africa and research has shown that only 5 000 of them are functional. Of those about 1 000 produce 95% plus pass rates and enrich their learners by way of extra-curricular activities, including community service, sport and cultural activities.

There a variety of reasons for this situation and the main one is that decades of apartheid education intentionally saw to it that the majority of our schools should be inferior. One of the tools used was to create a funding chasm between the schools in the townships and those in the white suburbs – an apartheid educational geography. The legacy of that planning still persists.

The 1000-odd functioning schools are found mainly in the former white suburban areas and most, though not all, of the dysfunctional ones are in the locations.

No child should be condemned to an inferior education because of where they were born and where they live, Gauteng MEC for education Panyaza Lesufi has said more than once, and he is absolutely right.

He has also said that apartheid was man-made and non-racialism should be man-made, and that the poor deserve good education so they can get out of poverty. We need to have one education system. Spot on, again. But what is he going to do about it? And what has the government done about it in the 25 years that it has had control of the national purse, and the ability to make laws?

Remember too that corporate South Africa has long realised the need to fix education and has thrown billions at the problem. Corporate social investment spending in South Africa totalled R6.8 billion in 2016, of which some 48% was channelled into educational projects. That’s more than R2.3 billion, in one year alone.

There is more money spent on education that on just about any other single issue, yet we find ourselves worse off that ever before. And if you are wondering how bad it really is consider that at a significant number of those 20 000 dysfunctional schools teenage pregnancy is a major issue, learners go hungry on a daily basis (and in some the provincial feeding schemes are being looted); there are 0% matric pass rates in quite a few; children are regularly drowning in pit latrines in others; and the senior girls in some of the high schools are systematically being sexually abused by the teachers and even the principals.

There should be a state-led project, bigger than anything we have seen in the last 25 years and designed by people far smarter than me, to fix this, once and for all.

What has the actual response been? Apart from inserting himself into the limelight at schools where issues arise from time to time, Lesufi hasn’t really done much that is easily seen.

He has been on about the apartheid spatial planning issue for a while. The introduction of the online registration system was, at heart, intended to force functioning schools to take in learners who live in areas where the local schools have collapsed. In line with that, the Gauteng Education Department last week decreed that school feeder zones will be expanded to a 30km radius instead of the previous 5km.

The move will prevent schools from turning down applicants who live far away, and to the extent that some schools are doing that to deliberately exclude learners who they see as undesirable, it’s a good thing. Not that all school do that. For many of them, changes in suburban demographics have forced them to trawl for learners from further afield for a long time now anyway. In cases where schools have enough children in their immediate surroundings to fill their classrooms, the implication that some of them will have to travel to a school further away to make room for other applicants who live up to 30km away just doesn’t make practical sense.

It’s a band aid exercise. Let’s force the functional schools to take in the learners from the areas where the schools don’t work and we won’t have to work out how we are going to fix those dysfunctional ones.

The 1000 functioning schools will become overcrowded, and some of them will drop off that list and the 20 000 dysfunctional ones will remain the same, or deteriorate further.

Simplistic solutions are not helpful, I know, but there are well-paid, elected people who should be working on the complex ones. When they come up with ones that do work they should be more about raising the failing schools up than about dragging the working ones down.

Changing feeder zones will get a lot of approval but it will not make a sustainable difference. The one educational system that Panyanza Lesufi is calling for will never exist until they get those 20 000 dysfunctional schools working.