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.

The season's done and the recruitment scourge is still with us

There’s no reason why you should remember it, but I offered my two cents worth of opinion in this space back in May about the practice of recruiting schoolboy players as if they were full professionals, commodities in the marketing strategies of schools who use the results of their first rugby teams to differentiate themselves.

Here’s a link to that blog – the gist of it was that it might be wise to consider the way they do it in Auckland where a player from a “premier” school cannot play A team sport at a new school unless the principal of the school he came from signs off that he or she is happy that the move was above board.

https://theogarrun.blogspot.com/2018/05/recruitment-let-principals-swear-to-it.html

I’ve put this old scratched record on the turntable again (only the old toppies among you will know what that means) after attending the Iqhawe Week in Joburg last week and having a chat with Stefan Terblanche, the CEO of the SA Rugby Legends. The Iqhawe Week and the Vuka rugby programme are the brain children (can you say that?) of the Legends.

They encourage and promote rugby at schools where the game used to be played and is now under threat of disappearing, and they encourage schools that don’t play to introduce the game. There is no shortage of coaches and mentors among their members and they raise the money to fund the exercise.

Vuka is the interschool programme they run and the Iqhawe Week is an under-15 interprovincial week, run on the same lines as the Craven and Grant Khomo Weeks, featuring only players from schools who field four teams or less.

This was the third one I’ve attended and the standard of play has definitely improved. Terblanche reckons it the best he has seen in the six years it’s been going.

What interested me – and I’m getting to my point now – was seeing some familiar faces there, the same ones I saw at the Craven Week in Paarl. The scouts from the top schools were there, scribbling in their programmes, and adjusting the cheque books in their back pockets, while running their practiced eyes over the players on display.

They were looking for black African players to recruit. Those are what the quota regulations require nowadays and it’s easier (if you have the money) to manufacture rather than buy.

One of then told me that the Legends are happy with their presence – if a player is spotted there and get an offer to go to a top school, that’s good for him. I asked Stefan Terblanche about that and he concurred, but added a condition – the interests of the player have to come first and they will give their blessing if they are happy that he will be helped to fit in and that he won’t be discarded if he doesn’t fulfill the promise seen in him.

It’s complicated. You can’t begrudge a talented player who is at a non-rugby school the opportunity to realise his potential but, at the same time, taking him away is not helping that school’s rugby to improve.

I may be conflicted about that, but I have absolutely no doubt about how I feel about the movement of players between well-established rugby schools – they must just stop it!

Tinus Diedericks, the chairman of the Golden Lions Schools Rugby Association, tells me they have adopted the Auckland model in the North Vaal schools association and this year a player who was not signed off by his former principal was not allowed to play in the 1^st team of his new school.

That can only happen with centrally-run leagues like the North Vaal run. In places where games are all friendlies, arranged by the two schools involved, you have to depend on the heads to act ethically. They don’t all do that, I’m afraid.

I can think of two examples in the season that’s just ended of players from good rugby schools turning up at other good rugby schools without the heads of their formers schools hearing a word until they were gone.

If those players were scouted at the Iqhawe Week I could understand (if not totally accept it) but they were already receiving good coaching and playing against top opposition. They were recruited for one reason only – to help their new teams win matches.

Worse, the heads of the new schools were there when it was agreed that players can’t move without the knowledge and approval of the principal of the school they came from.

If you can’t trust people to comply with self-regulation you have to impose laws. That’s what they do in Auckland, and in the North Vaal leagues. Maybe, now that the season’s over, it’s time to start doing something about it, instead of just letting it all happen again next year.

That’s what I said back in May.

What about the example being set, Serena?

Years ago, when the old Transvaal Rugby Referees Society changed its jersey to a harlequin design – black and red squares – the then president of the union, Jannie Le Roux commented:

Julle gedra julle soos narre, so dit is goed dat julle soos narre aantrek – You behave like clowns, so it’s just as well that you dress like clowns.

I don’t know why I suddenly remembered that story from those days when I spent a fair amount of my time running around, blowing a whistle and taking abuse form all sides. But that attitude to match officials reared its head this week with the Serena Williams incident.

Now, I think it’s unfair, but I have a bit of a reputation for being whinger when it comes to referees and, yes, just because the Springboks were awful on Saturday doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to point out that Glen Jackson was rubbish.

Which makes me a hypocrite because I also believe that respect for the match officials and accepting rough decisions are among the lessons that sport teaches which are applicable to other aspects of life.

I don’t watch tennis much – I find it quite boring – and have no idea what the codes they are talking about are, but if a player gets in the ref’s face the way Williams did on Saturday, and he doesn’t take action then he’s a feckless wimp and he should change to soccer where it seems there are no rules against that sort of behaviour.

The player’s struggle past, her gender and race are all real, but they all have nothing to do with it. If that was the case then Makazole Mapimpi should be allowed forward passes because he’s black; Bafana Bafana must be allowed to use their hands (they’d probably still lose anyway) and Laura Wolfaardt should only have two stumps behind her when she bats.

No, the rules are there to govern the game and the players contract to obey them. If they don’t, the umpire has the duty (not the choice) to apply the sanction that the laws demand. No-one has a right to expect different treatment – if they want that they should go and play with themselves. Any game belongs to both opponents and it’s the laws of the game and the vigilance and neutrality of the referee or umpire that’s supposed to ensure that.

What really bothers me, of course, is the effect that incidents like this have on those in the schools who are trying to teach and learn the life lessons that sport is supposed to teach. Someone tweeted, as a joke I guess, that Serena should not be smashing tennis racquets when there are so many children in the world who dream of owning one but probably never will.

It’s actually a good point, as is the one made by Martina Navratilova:

“I don’t believe it’s a good idea to apply a standard of ‘If men can get away with it, women should be able to, too’. Rather, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?"

If you behave the way Williams did in front of a world-wide TV audience, including all the kids who want to be you one day, you don’t deserve sympathy and those who are supporting you obviously haven’t thought of the example that’s being set.

And for the tennis authorities to be supporting Williams is sheer madness. How can they ever expect their umpires to make sure that their matches are fair contests again?

They may as well stick men and women in clown suits in the high chairs and let their champions run free.

Let's leave a future in rugby out of it

I’m sure many of you, since you have already shown you are crazy enough to read the nonsense I spew in this space, are also readers, like I am, of Bill’s Rugby Blog, Views from the armchair.

Old Bill, the writer, is incredibly knowledgeable and does massive research into what he writes about (I should be doing some of that), but he does need a good sub-editor – his pieces are often quite long.

Anyway, in a recent offering he says rugby is at the crossroads. “Rugby has sold its soul to the Devil,” he writes, “a deal was made back in 1995 at those crossroads where amateurism and professionalism crossed paths. It was a deal that promised many benefits, in the form of massive broadcasting deals, huge salary packages for the players, and superior quality rugby for the supporters and fans.

“And it is a deal that has not worked out nearly as well as expected.”

And rugby’s at at a place where an offer of redemption versus eventual oblivion is on the table again, he believes. “In essence, Professional Rugby is a failure at the box-office and on the balance sheet,” he says, then goes on to describe how and why World Rugby and all the rugby playing nations are, basically, bankrupt.

It’s a great read:

http://billsrugbyblog.com/rugby-at-the-crossroads/

It’s a failing industry, is his point, so we have to ask why we believe it’s a good thing for schools to be justifying the way in which they are running their rugby programmes in terms of preparing boys for a future as professionals, working in that industry.

And you can add to that the story going around at the moment that South Africa’s rugby companies are looking to cut the numbers of professional players on their books by half.

So, equating school rugby programmes as a way of preparing boys for future careers with, say, teaching maths and science to potential engineers and technicians, is reckless and dishonest.

Tenda Mtwararira is the only current Springbok who has played more than 100 Tests. He made his debut in 2008 – a 10 year career at the top.

Of the other centurions, Victor Matfield went longest – 15 years. Jean de Villiers played for 13 years, Bryan Habana for 12, with Percy Montgomery and John Smit both having 11 year-long careers.

Matfield, of course, took a three year break in the middle. The point is that these extraordinary players were at the top of their careers for only roughly a decade.

And they are the only six, out of all the Springboks in their era. There are provincial and franchise players who last longer, but they earn less and, given the bigger numbers, the odds of making it at that level are even slimmer than for the Springboks.

So, to put dreams of World Cup glory in the heads of 16 year-old is fine, it’s part of the job, I guess. But don’t justify all the shenanigans that go in in schools rugby in terms of preparing boys for long and lucrative careers in the game.

No. Let’s face it, winning is the dominant value and there are schools that are prepared to go to all sorts of lengths to win games and appear at the top of the rankings.

We all know what those lengths are and among the most odious of them is the luring of players who are doing well where they are to your school. It happened last week – and here I confess to being a little partisan – when a grade 11 boy who had a decent Craven Week for the Golden Lions began school at a school that is in the Boland, but supplies players to the Western Province provincial teams.

There was no communication between the schools prior to his move and, I believe there’s an insistence that the school has not given him a bursary. Well, someone has paid to entice him to change schools for his matric year.

In spreading this story I’ve been given a variety of reasons why a player at a good rugby school would want to move after learning the game, along with friends of four years or longer, at the school he was at.

I don’t buy any of them, but the one that really is rubbish is the one that goes that he has a better chance of becoming a professional player if he attends a top school.

There’s a callous cruelty to knowingly making empty promises. Politicians do that, not educators.