Online registration is not the answer to our schooling woes

So the Gauteng Department of Education’s online registration process got under way on Monday.

I’m afraid I’m conflicted on the issue – I know that there are schools who use lack of capacity as an excuse for hanging on to exclusivity, which in the South African context means keeping children of a certain race or social category out – but I also acknowledge that there are diversionary tactics at work here: the government is using the “all schools belong to everyone” line to cover up the fact that in 25 years they have done little to improve the overall supply of quality school education.

Instead their answer is to make well-functioning schools in the suburbs admit kids from areas quite remote from them where the schools are dysfunctional.

Gauteng MEC for Education Panyazi Lesufi tweeted on Monday, in response to the common assertion that the online recruitment policy is a way of bringing the top down rather that lifting the bottom up:

If your ancestors didn’t give us gutter education dysfunctional schools won’t exist. Beside, all schools belong to all our children. Gauteng is the number Province in terms of education so your accusation is baseless. Out of the top 10 Districts in the country 8 are in Gauteng

He’s right. Apartheid education was designed to produce inferior schooling and the underperforming, dysfunctional system that we are saddled with has its origins there.

To redress those massive, intentional imbalances was never going to be easy, even in 25 years. I’m not so arrogant to suggest that I know what should be done, but I do think that as a tax-payer, one who has education at heart, I have the right to expect an honest attempt to at least get on the right road to recovery.

I’m afraid the current state of affairs doesn’t provide much evidence to support that having happened. Mr Lesufi’s insinuation that the schools in Gauteng aren’t dysfunction based on the fact that Gauteng achieved the top overall pass rate in the matric exams at the end of last year doesn’t really tell the story.

In the first instance, it’s based on just that one measure – the grade 12 examination. The ANA (annual national assessments) were dropped in 2015, remember, at the insistence of the teacher union, SADTU, who recognised that they were a way of holding their members accountable for their performance.

I’ll speak later about what I think can be done to eliminate the equality without lowering standards at the performing schools, but a good place to start would be to break the power of SADTU. Get all the teachers to do their jobs and, without doing anything else, there will be a significant and immediate improvement.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of the throughput rate. The Matric pass rate may be rising, but we should remember that only about 40%, on average, of the kids who began school 12 years earlier actually go right through to the end of the grade 12 year and the final exams. Taking that into consideration the 75% pass rate published is probably closer to 50%. And research has shown that the province with the highest pass rates have had the biggest decline in numbers of learners writing the final exams.

So, maybe things are going as well in Gauteng as what the MEC would have us believe.

The bottom line is that we have too many schools that aren’t functioning properly. The children exiting those schools, without a quality education, are largely doomed to unemployment and poverty. That’s a major factor in the ongoing inequality in the land.

Making the schools in the suburbs, who are functioning well take in those children won’t solve the problem. They will never have the capacity to do so and, yes, they do want to maintain their standards – standards that are often dependent on the financial support of parents and alumni.

Changing the rules governing intake to allow the kids from the townships to attend them is a good thing, in principle, especially is those schools are being intentionally elitist and reactionary. But it would be a better thing to fix the township schools so the kids can get an equally good education in the communities they live in.

It’s the responsibility of a community to raise its children. The school should be at the centre of the community with the teachers, parents and community organisations all contributing to the cause.

A child who travels for an hour and a half each way, via two taxis, to a school on the other side of town is at a disadvantage. And it’s just about impossible for her parents to become part of that school community.

So, what can be done? Well, as I said you can rein the unions in. Then you can invest in leadership development for principals. There isn’t a good school that doesn’t have a good leader. The outlier schools in the townships that produce great results with limited resources can inevitably be explained by the presence of a principal who insists on excellence and who leads his/her team to achieve it.

Most importantly, the children need to attend the local school. That way the community can work together to raise them. That’s the only way it can be done properly.

The high-tech online registration system, as well-intentioned as it may be, is working directly against that.

The downside of having super schools

A downside to the emergence of rugby “super” schools was always going to be the decline and possible demise of the rest.

Not all schools have the resources, or the desire, to become rugby powerhouses and so they have lagged behind. Parents of talented boys who want them to develop into good players no longer send their sons to the local high school like they used to in the old days and those who do start off there may well move to a better rugby programme elsewhere later on. Most switch of their own accord, but some are lured by bursaries and other financial incentives.

The result has been an ever-widening gap, rugby wise, between the top and the bottom schools to the extent that they no longer play against each other any more.

It’s been happening for a while now and it’s reflected in the fixture lists. 20 years ago Jeppe, for instance, would have played schools like Sandringham, Highlands North, Potch Boys’ High and Athlone. Those schools underwent rapid demographic transformation and rugby fell by the wayside. That’s understandable and inevitable What’s more disturbing, though, is that schools that have run healthy rugby programmes in the past are battling to cope now.

That’s been apparent over the last two weekends in Joburg as the private schools returned from their holidays and are scheduled to meet the powerhouses – Jeppe, KES, Pretoria Boys’ High. While they were away, the big state boys schools played each other, or met similar level schools from other provinces – Affies, Westville etc, and some of them will play each other again later in the year.

Now, however, they have Saturdays to fill and the opposition they are facing is not up to it. Sure, they are competitive at 1st team and age group A team level, but they don’t field as many teams in each age group as the big schools do and because it’s always been a numbers game, their Bs and Cs are getting creamed. There have been “whitewash” fixtures and 60 plus score lines and that’s not good for anyone, winners or losers.

Any mother who watches her son - who is probably being far outweighed by the opposition week after week - and sees his team lose by 50 points three weeks in a row would be justified in withdrawing him from rugby.

One private boys school, one that has produced many provincial players over the years, has declared that this might well be their last season of rugby. That’s deeply disturbing.

It’s a complicated issue, and there’s no blame to be assigned. The big rugby schools field 20 plus teams each week, they are all well coached, and they want all of them to play games regularly. The smaller schools have allowed the numbers to dwindle, for whatever reason, to the extent that they cannot supply enough opposition anymore.

It’s not unique to our schools rugby. Exactly the same issues were raised recently in New Zealand recently following a report which found that overall numbers of kids playing rugby were dropping, and that fewer schools were offering the sport.

The top schools apply the latest scientific developments, they have top coaches and the boys work very hard. We all know that success doesn’t happen automatically. Their teams play rugby that is a joy to watch and, naturally, the bulk of the selected provincial players will come from them.

You can’t expect them to back down on the excellent development they are providing. The problem, though, is that they will pretty soon have no-one to play against on a weekly basis (except each other). That would mean the end of the traditional local fixture system, but it will also mean a narrowing of the player base, and that can’t be good for the game.

There’s not much that can be done about it now. The irony, though, is that while our top schools have shown themselves to be among the best in the world, the rest of the school rugby system is crumbling.

KES vs Jeppe is a proper derby

It was the great screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, who said that if you repeat something you have written yourself and published before, it’s not plagiarism.

He was talking about common expressions that have been repeated, quite often sometimes, in his TV series and movies. I’m a big fan and they were great lines, worthy of the repetition, I thought.

So I, not that I can compare myself to Sorkin in any way, am going to do the same and rehash a piece that I wrote before.

It’s about the top school rugby derbies – and it’s relevant this week because the whole North Eastern side of Joburg is in a tizzy ahead of Saturday’s game between Jeppe and KES. And I guess it’s the same in South of Cape Town where SACS will be hosting Bishops this weekend.

Here’s how I started it:

Some time last year one of the school sport websites ran a poll asking its readers to name what they saw as the biggest schoolboy rugby derbies in the country.

Not surprisingly, the Paarl derby – Paarl Gimnasium v Paarl Boys’ High – came out tops. Second was K-Day, the Grahamstown clash between St Andrew’s College and Kingswood, and third was Jeppe v King Edward.

I’ve been never been to K-Day, although I have been fortunate to attend the Paarl inter-schools game, and I’m off to Jeppe this morning to watch another KES-Jeppe encounter – I guess I’ve been to just about every one of them in the last 20 years.

My views will always be biased, based on personal experience, and I suspect that the Grahamstown derby was elevated in importance by the volume of votes cast in the poll by old boys of the schools involved.

There is simply nothing like that game in Paarl. The entire town is either blue or maroon, even the trees are bandaged in the colours of the respective schools and the buildup to the game runs for weeks beforehand. It is played at the town stadium, which is always filled to capacity.

In my experience, the second biggest local derby is Pretoria Boys’ High v Affies. It’s a derby in the purest form of the term – between schools that share a fence line, more of that later. There’s a tribal intensity to it and the results down the years have shown that playing record going into the game is not necessarily an indicator of what’s going to happen on the day.

Oddly, the Pretoria derby doesn’t make the top five in the poll, maybe that’s because the website didn’t have too many Afrikaans-speaking readers to vote for it.

And third is today’s clash (KES vs Jeppe). This is (was then) the 79^th time the match has been played and, if anything, it’s getting bigger year by year. There isn’t the close proximity of schools that you get in Pretoria, but it’s similar to the Paarl game in the traditional socio-economic status of the communities involved.

Things have changed over the years and schools no longer draw pupils from their immediate surroundings, but the Paarl schools, in the past, were referred to as “onder-dorp” and “bo-dorp”: upper and lower town, the wine farmers vs the townsfolk. There’s a conflict there that adds spice to the encounter.

Similarly, today’s clash is Houghton v Jeppestown, Northern v Southern Joburg. The fact that the boys now come from all over town, and many of the rugby players from all over the country, notwithstanding. The contrast in origins is something the old boys like to shout about – in a nice way – and it makes for a great occasion.

I then went on to explain the origin of the term “derby game" and how it comes from Liverpool. The Everton v Liverpool football match was the original derby game. It was first played in 1894 and called the derby because the clubs were located on opposite ends of Stanley Park – the estate of the Earl of Derby.

The Liverpool derby

On that basis, King Edward vs St John’s is a better derby, as was Jeppe v Athlone, in the days when the Bez Valley School was a rugby powerhouse. Grey College v Paul Roos Gimnasium – cited by many as the biggest derby of all – is not a derby game at all.

But, KES and Jeppe are neighbors – no question - and it’s going to be standing room only at Jeppe on Saturday. You won’t witness more commitment from the players in any other sporting event in town. You can’t argue with that.

The Jeppe vs KES derby

The top five derbies listed in that poll were: 1 Paarl Gimnasium vs Paarl Boys High,2 Kingswood College vs St Andrew’s College, 3 KES vs Jeppe, 4 Bishops vs Rondebosch, 5 Hilton vs Michaelhouse.

How you make people feel is what counts

I can’t find it now, but I read a tweet the other day from one of the “philosopher coaches” that I follow on Twitter that paraphrased a Maya Angelou quote:

““People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The tweeter was saying that those you coached won’t remember wins and losses, they’ll remember the impact you as a coach made in their lives.

I was prompted to look it up after attending the memorial service for Norman McFarland at St John’s College earlier this week.

McFarland, who passed away at the age of 79 was a highly successful school rugby coach, first at King Edward VII school, and later at other schools and clubs. There would have been many factors that led to his success, but the one that stood out was his innovation. He reinvented the game, and he did it because, those days, you coached the material that you were presented – no shopping to fill gaps – and he made up for deficiencies in size and natural ability by out-thinking his opponents.

So, famously, his teams employed three-man scrums and two-man lineouts, negating the size disadvantage that they were at, and they beat teams that were clearly physically superior to them. There is a story, retold at the memorial service, that the International Rugby Board actually changed the laws of the game because of his tactics. I suspect that that’s apocryphal, but I was a Union referee those days and I do recall that we would spend a lot of time at our monthly law discussion meetings trying to figure out what was legal and what wasn’t and how to referee his teams.

Eventually those practices were outlawed, as part of wider law changes made in the name of player safety, but by then Norman had already moved on and was developing other new ways to get an edge, usually with success.

The family tributes at the service were deeply moving, but there were two eulogies by non-family members that said, to me, that Norman McFarland was the kind of coach and person that Maya Angelou was talking about.

One was by a star rugby player, a member of one of the most successful teams the school ever had. He never spoke about that at all. Instead, he remembered that, when he was skinny little kid in the prep school, Norman spoke to him. He knew his name, and he was pleased to hear that he would be coming to the high school the next year.

The other wasn’t sporting at all. He remembered how, as a junior at the school, he tried out for basketball, but had no interest or ability and sat on the bench most of the time. McFarland, the coach, spotted him and engaged him in a conversation on books and reading – an area that he did have a passion for. It was, the speaker said, an extraordinary perceptive action.

I met Norman in 1978 when I started coaching rugby at a rival school. He was a fearsome opponent and our teams simply never beat his. I moved on to other things and somehow my path crossed his every now and then. What I remember was that he was always friendly and very often kind to me.

He was a jogger, everyone knows that, and he used to pound the streets around St John’s College where he worked. I lived in nearby Bellevue East and for a time I also ran around the suburbs. We’d meet quite often on the sidewalks and he’d say thing like: “you are looking strong today” and “I can see that weight falling off you.” I was running to try to slim down, so you can imagine how that made me feel.

And when I became a journalist and went on a bit of a crusade against uneducational and dishonest practices in school sport he would tell me, whenever I saw him, that he agreed with something I wrote and he congratulated me. Again, imagine how I felt.

That’s what I’ll remember about Norman McFarland. He was the doyen of rugby coaches, I read and still have his book on it, and I watched his teams play breath-taking rugby. But like those I listened to last Tuesday, it’s the way he made me feel that made the deepest impact.

Good men, not good players. That's what it's really all about

I, like many I guess, didn’t know why the running out of Jos Buttler at the bowler's end by Ravi Ashwin in the Indian Premier League recently is called a “mankad”.

So, I Googled it, and found out that this type of dismissal was named after Indian bowler Vinoo Mankad, who dismissed Australia’s Bill Brown in this fashion during the second Test in Sydney in 1947. It was the second time he got Brown out in that way on that tour and it caused a mighty uproar. The name stuck after that.

I’d never heard the term before, although I have come across incidents where backing up batsmen have been warned by the bowler and I always thought the laws of the game required that to happen before the batsman could be dismissed in this way.

It turns out that there’s nothing in the laws, or in the MCC guidance notes on the Spirit of Cricket, saying that there has to be a warning, so the dismissal in he IPL was perfectly legal and that’s the end of it.

It’s not really the end of it though, is it? Cricket, in particular, is a game that teaches life lessons all over the place, that’s why it’s such a good sport to play in schools.

The expression “it’s just not cricket” is what that’s all about and although it may be an old fashioned concept with a bit of a paternalistic, colonial tint to it, the principle behind it is not.

It means just what the mankad debate is all about – sometimes the right thing to do is not in the laws, but it is the right thing to do. If you don’t do it it’s, well, just not cricket.

Cricket’s a good game for teaching values to school sportsmen and women, but any game will do the same, it all depends on the way it’s coached and managed.

I firmly believe that the real reason we include sport in the school curriculum is to develop the young people involved into good human beings who can go out into the world one day and make a positive contribution.

It may be that they do that as professional players, but that’s incidental, that’s not the reason why we run sporting programmes at schools.

Any teacher or coach responsible for the running of a school sport programme who doesn’t have in mind that the most important task is to teach children to behave honourably and according to the values and ethics that are included in the ephemeral “spirit of the game” is not, in my opinion, doing his or her job.

And a cricket coach who teaches a bowler to mankad a batsman, or for that matter, tells a batsman that it’s OK to steal a yard backing up because there’s no chance that he will be mankaded, should be fired.

Let’s send young people out into the world who do good because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s just not cricket to do otherwise.

Can I add an example from the weekend past that, for me illustrates what I’m talking about?

I was sent a copy of an e-mail to the principal of a school congratulating his boys on their behaviour at an airport on their way back from one of the weekend rugby festivals. I won’t say which school but the name wouldn’t surprise anyone who, like me, spends a lot of time among schoolboys in Joburg.

The boys, just hours after what must have been a devastating, narrow defeat that afternoon, sprung to the assistance of two different mothers struggling with babies, prams and bulky luggage, in the wind, and cheerfully saw them on and off the plane and onto the airport bus.

No real losers in that team – they have been taught, and they have learnt, the more important lessons that, in this case, rugby is meant to teach.

Danone competition offers some light in soccer's darkness

In the days when my job forced me to listen to what people like him had to say, I recall hearing Dennis Mumble, the CEO of SAFA, tell audiences more than once that one of the problems with South African football was that the “white” schools play rugby and won’t let their boys play soccer.

By “white” he was referring to the former model C and private schools where, we all know, the majority of pupils are black, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that he was lying, and he knew he was.

I can say that because I saw him, on more than one occasion, at tournaments and matches involving those sorts of schools and where the white players on the fields were certainly in the minority. Where he was correct is that the rugby-playing schools don’t generally enter the SA Schools Football Association’s tournaments in the various age groups. Those competitions run throughout the year and will disrupt other sporting programmes. Why is that a problem necessarily? They will tell you that they want their boys to be involved with a range of activities, in summer and winter, and soccer season runs from August to October.

Only three months? True. But in that time the soccer teams at Joburg’s boys schools play roughly twice as many matches than their rugby teams do in their five-month season. And they are proper games, on good fields, in proper kit, well-refereed etc. In short, the soccer players benefit from the advantaged positions that those well-resourced schools hold.

It isn’t fair, but it’s not the reason why Bafana Bafana struggle the way they do. In fact, good leadership should surely be able to find a way to turn the quality that exists in that system to the advantage of soccer as a whole.

Instead, like Mr Mumble, they choose to pretend it doesn’t exist.

There is, however, a chink of light. It’s at primary school level where for the third year now schools from the Johannesburg Primary Schools Football Association -the body that runs the game at the former model C and private schools - are playing in the under-12 Danone Nations Cup competition.

The primary schools play soccer in the second term, of course, so timing’s not a problem. And importantly, the organisers have bent the existing model a bit to accommodate them. They have their own regional playoff system, which they have woven into their traditional-fixtures way of doing things and a slot has been created at the Gauteng provincial finals of the competition for the team that comes through.

Not all the Joburg schools enter – it takes a bit longer for all minds to shift – but the numbers are increasing and all the signs are positive.

No team from that side of the draw has made it through to the competition’s national finals yet. Perhaps they aren’t as good as they thought they were after all, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that a significant barrier has been breached and, for the kids involved, new things have been experienced and new acquaintances made. And it’s good for the game.

That’s what sport, and education, is supposed to be about, and those on both sides of this particular issue need to make more of it happen.

School rugby's slash and burn culture

The schools rugby season hasn’t started yet – although there could well be some sort of “super” 8,12,16 or whatever, competition somewhere where the boys are already playing games – but the debate is up and running, and it’s not about the good things that the game brings to education.

No, it’s all negative and there are two camps: those who believe that the professionalisation of the game at school level is a good thing and that the standard of play evident at the top schools, and the quality of the players emerging from them, excuses the methods used to get to that level; and those who say it’s daft on all sorts of levels.

No prizes for guessing which side of the fence I’m sitting on.

Among the many articles written on the issues is this one by Mark Keohane:

https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/sport/schoolboy-rugby-corrupting-the-game-by-selling-its-soul-19086344

He refers to the report on the inquiry into school rugby coming out of New Zealand:

http://files.allblacks.com/community-rugby/NZR-Secondary-School-Report-Executive-Summary.pdf

The articles remind us that things are not healthy, and that the problem is not restricted to just us. It’s what I and others have been going on about for years now. And at heart what we are saying is that while it may be right to begin preparing the next generation of professional players early, that process should not have anything to do with school rugby.

Sure, the schools are where the best coaches, the facilities and the high levels of competition are found, but that’s not a good thing. It’s selling the soul of the game, as Keohane points out. Worse, there is little educational integrity left in what is happening around school rugby. And if there is one thing that’s not debatable it’s that everything that happens in a school has to be educationally accountable in the end.

South Africa won’t remain in the top tier of international rugby if we don’t keep the pipeline of talented young players flowing, no-one’s denying that, what I’m saying is that it isn’t the job of the schools to do that. We also have the unique imperative of having to increase the number of black players at the top levels and, while schools should be, and are, doing that, those running the game can’t outsource that responsibility and wash their hands of it.

I have confessed to conflicting interests in all of this. I’m a lover of schoolboy rugby, of both types. I love going to the Easter rugby festivals to watch some of the “top 10” teams play, and I go to the Craven Week every year and I’m always astounded at the quality of the teams and by the talent on show.

But I also love hearing that when King Edward play Maritzburg College, for example, that there will be 23 rugby matches on the day, and I enjoyed going to King David Victory Park, for example, on a Wednesday to see them play a 12 a-side game against Saheti (reduced in numbers because of the BokSmart regulations which, in that case, didn’t do the game much good); and I especially enjoyed watching Roosevelt play Greenside – in a game with 15 black players in each team, refereed by a white woman – and hearing the players respectfully call her ma’am and abide by all her decisions without question.

You cannot argue that both types of school rugby aren’t important and valuable. If only they could both continue to thrive, side, by side. But they can’t, and they don’t anymore. The elite, professional side of the game is murdering the other one and the killers, with blood on their hands, are those who believe that winning 1^st team rugby games is the primary measure of success for a school and that school rugby is where the preparation of players for the professional game should take place. Those who support what’s going on, or condone the practices adopted to make these things happen are also culpable.

The unsavoury practices that take place have been listed often enough. The one getting most attention right now is recruitment of players. That’s the big one – if you strip the other schools of their talent so that your team can be stronger you are encouraging them to give up and you are creating a small pool of super schools that no-one else is good enough to play against. If you can’t see why that’s bad then you aren’t paying attention.

Then there’s doping. The six 2018 Craven Week players bust for steroids is, by definition, just the tip of the ice berg. Don’t kid yourselves that all of the muscular giants we see every Saturday morning are clean.

Funding in some schools (and its source is irrelevant) is being used in eye-watering proportions to pay for elite rugby programmes. It’s being used to pay for bursaries, gymnasiums, coaches, professional support staff, all aimed at victory for the first team squad – 30 odd-boys in schools with 1 000 pupils typically – where’s the educational accountability in that?

It’s slash and burn agriculture. A few schools can brag about their top 10 finishes in the rankings and they may in the years to come see a handful of their ex-pupils make provincial teams, or even the Springboks, but they are leaving a desert around them.

That fun, mass participation, part of the game is disappearing, those smaller schools who pay low-key Wednesday rugby are opting for other sports and the majority of players in all the schools are simply not enjoying it anymore. Fewer and fewer of them carry on playing after school.

That’s what Keo, and the New Zealand report, mean when they say that the professionalisation of rugby at school level is killing the game. And because everyone knows that it’s happening, it really is murder.