It's not always all bad

I’ve become a sceptic when it comes to schools rugby. I usually expect the worst from schools, and I’m seldom disappointed.

In the last two weeks, however, I witnessed two events that restored my faith and reminded me that the people who dedicate so much time and effort so that schoolboys can play the game are among the best you’ll find.

And then, just as I was getting carried away, I came across a deeply disturbing situation at a school, one that confirmed my cynical views.

More of that later – first the good. I was at KES two weekends ago when Pine Pienaar, the highly qualified ex Blue-Bulls coach who has been hired, I assume to get Waterkloof’s 1^st team on the winning track, did something you don’t always see.

The referee, and his assistants, were somehow confused about a KES penalty goal attempt that everyone sitting at that end of the ground could see went over. A discussion ensued and the ref ruled it unsuccessful. The Waterkloof coaches were at that end and they too saw it cross the crossbar. One of them turned and told Pienaar that and he, immediately, went on the field, told the ref so, and it was reversed, giving KES three points at a stage when the game was still quite close.

Pienaar is a rugby boffin, everyone knows that. Now those who were there know he is also a true sportsman, with integrity. It was great to see.

And then there was last weekend’s game between Jeppe and Affies. Jeppe have never won that fixture and they were 41-38 up with time expired when Affies constructed a move that began in their own 22m area and ended with the winning try in the opposite corner.

It was heartbreaking for Jeppe, but the things that have been said since, including a wonderful letter by the headmaster, describing how Muzi Manyike, the 1^st team captain, and head boy, reacted to the defeat, have been amazing.

It showed that there can be a victory that has nothing to do with the final score.

For me, the cynicism-destroying moment came before the game. Muzi, and the vice captain, accompanied a tiny disabled boy onto the field to place the ball on the centre spot. And Muzi carried him off again. I learned afterwards that he is from an Aids orphanage close to the school, and the whole idea was Manyike’s himself.

Use the occasion of a big game to do something like that, and who cares if you win or lose?

The dampener came this week when I read an open letter to a school that appeared on a schools rugby website.

Read it yourself - http://www.talk.ruggas.co.za/?p=865 - and decide.

I found it very sad. For me, it sums up the gulf in thinking that exists between two groups of lovers of schoolboy rugby. Basically, it describes how Hoërskool Nelspruit is considering its options because its 1^st team is being beaten in the new Virseker Cup super league.

The writer predicts that if they leave the league, or step down a division, they will lose all their top players, their coaches, their standing in the community and their invitation to the St John’s Easter Festival.

They could well lose players to the cut-throat professionally run schools who will scoop them at a discounted price. What’s really alarming, however, is the assumption that they, and the coaches, will be prepared to go – no loyalty or school camaraderie there.

I do know a bit about how the Joburg Easter festival hosts think and I know that Nelspruit are invited back to St John’s each year because the organisers enjoy them as people, they like their rugby philosophy and the way the play the game. Whether they carry on playing Garsfontein, Monument and Helpmekaar or not next year will have nothing to do with their next invitation, I’d wager.

Here’s hoping there is more that’s good than bad at this weekend’s matches.

Everything in a school is teaching and learning

There hasn’t been any news, that I can find anyway, about what is transpiring at one of the country’s best-known boys schools after it was announced last week that the School Governing Body (SGB) had, effectively, fired their headmaster.

Well, they realised (or had been told by their lawyers) that they couldn’t actually dismiss him – he was employed by the education department after all – so they relieved him of a fair chunk of his duties.

Now, in a previous life I was a reporter who wrote quite a lot about labour law and just about all labour law news is about unfair dismissals, so I accumulated quite a bit of knowledge on the subject.

Much of it is skin-deep, I concede, although I was sent on training by Independent Newspapers to become a chairman of disciplinary enquiries. That was bizarre because that company steadfastly refused to spend a cent on any kind of staff development but then, those of us who became qualified soon realised, they needed someone to fire the people they were hell-bent on getting rid of.

Thankfully a change in the ownership of the company then occurred and the new guys had never heard of me, so I didn’t have to do any of that.

Digression over. The point is that I know what’s happening at that school simply cannot be legal according to the labour laws. Dismissals occur for two reasons only – misconduct and incapacity. If, as in this case, a worker is not performing satisfactorily, that’s incapacity and there’s a procedure of corrective action that has to be followed. I’m quite sure that never happened.

The issue of breakdown in the relationship of trust referred to in the statement put out by the school applies to misconduct cases. For example if your employee steals from the till then you can’t trust him and you are justified in firing him.

There’s no indication that anything of that sort happened.

What they did - and there’s a school sports angle coming up, trust me – is decide that the headmaster is employed, according to the Schools Act, to run the learning programme at the school and he can carry on with that. His other duties, and they list them, are under the control of the SGB, and he will no longer be in charge of those. He, like many heads of schools, receives additional payment each month from the SGB and he is, therefore, employed by them, as well as by the department.

My skin-deep legal expertise doesn’t cover educational law, so I assume they are on solid ground there, and that they have had legal advice. Even then, they have opened a can of worms and set a dangerous precedent.

Where I am confident in my convictions is in the role of sport in education.

I came across the website of the National Association of Independent Schools - https://www.nais.org/ , an American organisation, that has drawn up a set of Principles of Good Practice for its members. The one titled Athletics provides some excellent guidelines. It’s divided into School Athletics; Team Athletics and Coaches and in all three sections, it stresses that athletics (their word for sport) is part of the ediucational process.

Download it from:

https://www.nais.org/media/Nais/PGPs/NAIS_PGP_Athletics_2017.pdf

and you’ll see that it says:

"The school’s athletics program (sic) is an integral part of the school’s curriculum"; and "coaching is teaching: coaches are, foremost, teachers".

The implication made in the statement put out by that school is that isn’t so, as far as they are concerned. They say they are in charge of all activities with the exception of teaching and learning. They list, among the activities that they have control of the management of extra-curricular activities, including sport.

That means that sport is not part of teaching and learning and you have to ask, what is it then? And why is it happening at a school which is, after all, a place of teaching and learning, and nothing else.

As I said, a can of worms, and a dangerous precedent. I’m glad I’m not a school principal. Come to think of it, I’m glad I’m no longer at Independent Newpapers anymore either.

Recruitment - let the principals swear to it

There’s a statement you sometimes hear that goes along the lines of “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”. It’s been rejected by the business leadership gurus. I found that out when I Googled the term, hoping to find out who it was that said it first (Teddy Roosevelt is given the credit, though that’s not certain).

It’s been discredited, I read, because it discourages people from pointing out what’s wrong, unless they themselves know how to fix it. And, in any event, isn’t the boss being paid the big bucks because it’s his job to find solutions?

Of course, some problems don’t appear to have solutions. None that are easily apparent, anyhow.

I say all of this because I don’t accept that we should stop complaining about the sorry state of school rugby in this country because we can’t come up with ways to set things straight. Now I’m a whiner, not a solution provider – Teddy Roosevelt's actual quote was “complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining” – but even I have a suggestion on how recruitment, in particular, can be reined in.

The easy solution, of course, is to say: stop doing that! That would be the ethical, educational, socially responsible thing to do, but things have spun so far out of control that we all know that’s not a viable suggestion anymore.

I received a surprisingly big response to my recent retelling of the stories of the shocking experiences of two young players who were recruited on rugby bursaries.

I got an e-mail from someone in New Zealand who sent me the links to documents used by College Sport Auckland to regulate the movements of players between schools in their area.

Take a look at them.

https://collegesport.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/bsk-pdf-manager/2018/02/Statutory-Declaration-Forms.pdf

The gist of it is that when a player involved in what they call a premier sport moves from one school to another, the principal of the school he was at has the option to accept that it is a bona fide move, with nothing untoward about it, or he can ask the principal of the school the player is going to (the receiving school), the student and the student’s parents to fill in declaration forms.

Those forms must confirm that no pressure was put on the player or his family, no third party was involved in any way and that there was no incentive to move in the form of a bursary payment etc

Now we all know that in the SA situation sometimes the receiving principal will insist that none of the above happened. The boy just turned up at the school, they’ll tell us, and said he wants to be there. Or his parents moved from Cape Town last week and bought a house around the corner from the school.

What’s significant is that the Auckland declarations must be signed by a Justice of the Peace – they are sworn affidavits, in effect, and there’s a warning that a false declaration will be referred to the police and could lead to the expulsion of the school from competitions.

There’s a proposed solution right there. Get the principal to swear under oath that there was no luring of a player, and to take personal responsibility for any lies that are told. That would slow things down, I’d wager.

I guess that these regulations were introduced in Auckland because they were faced at some time with a similar situation to what we are facing now. The difference, of course, is that there appears to be a regulating body controlling school sport there. We don’t have that. School sport is under the control of the principal of the school here and we have to trust him or her to be honest.

And of course we must assume that our principals are honest and honourable. But are they all? If the stories we hear are true you have to wonder if, at best, the principals of the schools involved are simply not in the loop or at, at worst, whether they are complicit in some pretty shady practices.

Giving a multi-code organising body some sort of over-riding authority, or allowing the provincial of national federations to intervene won’t work here, in my opinion, because school sport is education, first and foremost.

So, don’t ask me how it’s going to work. I’m a whiner, not a solutions provider, after all.

Rugby recruitment's shameful tale of two cities

Let me tell you two stories. Names and places have been changed, they may not even be true, but you’ll agree that they probably are.They tell of the sorts of things that go in schools rugby these days.

Both involve grade 8 (standard 6) boys, both are black, both have the potential to be very good rugby players one day (well both are going to grow up to be big men, anyway), both are from impoverished backgrounds with uneducated parents who are working poorly paid jobs.

The first took place a few years ago and was reported in the Sunday papers. The youngster was from the South Western Districts region and was spotted at the primary schools Craven Week. He was offered a bursary to attend a school in the Northern Cape and ended up there in January the next year.

It was an alien place to him. His family may have been poor, the article said, but they created a warm and loving home. He had brothers and friends and was loved in the community. At the school they didn’t speak his home language. He looked different to the other boys and they didn’t try to make him welcome. He was unhappy and wanted to go home.

The school wouldn’t let him. They had, after all, spent a lot of money on him. The scouting process involved travel and accommodation costs, they had bought him a school uniform and books, and sports equipment. And they had given him a place in the hostel that might have gone to a fee-paying pupil. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some sort of cash incentive for the parents as well.

It was a standoff, and the reason why it made the national press was that his father subsequently drove across the country, broke into the school, and spirited his boy away in the dead of the night, with just the clothes he was wearing. What a thing to happen to a 13 year-old!

The other story happened a few weeks ago. It’s less dramatic, but if we were to find out what really went on it would probably leave as bad a taste in the mouth. The boy was also spotted while at primary school in a rural area and ended up on a bursary at a rugby school in the big city. That school has a reputation, and a system, for helping boys like him fit in and he seemed to be, I hear, quite happy there.

To cut it short, he is also no longer at the school that recruited him. His team went off to play in an under-14 tournament in another city during the recent holidays. On the Thursday he helped his side beat the host school and on the Monday he was there, attired in his new uniform and settled in to their hostel. I guess he was playing rugby for them by the next Saturday.

There was no communication between his new school and his old, although there was supposed to be, according to an agreement between the heads of schools. His parents obviously agreed to the move and you have to wonder what was offered to make that happen. The boy was already at a good rugby school, remember, and he was happy there.

Most will agree that these sorts of things shouldn’t happen. We all know that they still do. 13-year old kids are being bought and traded like professional football players. The schools will tell you they are acting in the interests of the children and, sure, they are giving them a better education (or at least the schools believe they are) and they will receive the coaching that will help them reach their potential as players.

If only that was the real motivation. They real reasons, I suspect, have to do with one thing only – ensuring a pipeline of players that will ensure that the school’s first rugby team carries on winning matches. Well, it’s also to create the illusion of transformation, and the provincial unions, weighed down by quota compliance issues, aren’t innocent in all of this either.

Similar stories. I hope they aren’t true but they probably are, I’m afraid.

Leading the way to school improvement

I’m involved, now that I have time on my hands, in a project to tell the story of a remarkable educational development programme that involves pairing the principals of struggling schools with business executives in a partnership designed to teach both of them a great deal about leadership under less than perfect circumstances and, at the same time, get the children at the schools that they are at learning.

That, sadly, is not happening at the vast majority of our schools. In fact, the figures say, of the 25 000-odd schools in the country, only 5 000 can be described as functional, and that includes the private schools.

The model I’m describing works, no question. Research is increasingly showing that school leadership is the most important factor in performance of the pupils. Why that is only being found out now is a mystery. In businesses, and other organisations it’s always been recognised that success is dependent on leadership. And millions are spent on developing managers and creating a succession pipeline.

In the education system, largely, that’s not the case. School principals are appointed on the basis of their teaching record, mainly, and given little by way of training or on-the-job support.

The money that is spent on trying to revive dying schools goes mainly into educational materials and equipment (ITC is all the rage these days) and into teacher development, without considering that none of the above will make much difference if the man or woman in the principal’s office is not able to do the job.

All of those other things are necessary, of course, and when the need is there, those who are able to have a responsibility to help out where they can. And the private sector is doing that. In 2016 more than R6 billion was spent by corporate funders on corporate social investment (CSI) projects in schools.

Of course there are success stories. “Saturday schools” supported by corporate funders, for example, are run at a number of top private schools. Matric learners, who aren’t getting enough good teaching at their township schools are bussed in on Saturdays, and during the school holidays, and are taught by the best educators around and they inevitably perform brilliantly in their final examinations.

Who can begrudge giving those brilliant young people the opportunities in life that they might not have gotten but for those intereventions? But, you have to ask, how is this helping the schools they come from?

Partners for Possibility, the project I’m writing about, believes it’s wrong to divorce schooling from the community in this way, and that it would be far more sustainable to capacitate the principal of the struggling school. He should be leading the teachers at the school so that they do the teaching they are being paid to do. Instead of exporting the education of the kids to the fancy schools in the suburbs, the community should take responsibility for the proper raising of its young, the way it was always supposed to do.

The bottom line is that, 25 years since the abolishment of apartheid education, things are actually worse in our schools. The well-meaning interventions are not bringing about any long-term improvements.

It’s an awfully big challenge, but Partners for Possibility has some very clever people working on how it should be tackled and some incredibly powerful school leaders have agreed to become part of the programme in the eight years it’s been running.

Close to 800 principals have been partnered with businesspeople so far, and I have been writing up case studies that would amaze you.

I took on this task for something to do. It’s become way more than that, it’s given me a glimpse of a cutting-edge exercise that may just get us out of our educational hole. 

For more information go to http://www.pfp4sa.org/