Cape Town - Around 150 people gathered at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) where the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC) with various educationists, teachers’ unions and Rutgers University in the US, launched a programme for Basic Education dubbed the Labour Management Partnership.
The programme is largely modelled around its namesake in the US, with the South African model to focus on collaboration in the school environment involving teachers and unions in decision-making processes.
The programme was launched on Tuesday, continuing today, at the CTICC, with Department of Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga delivering the keynote address.
Panellists included a delegation from the US, namely Rutgers University, School of Management and labour relations Professor Saul Rubinstein, Montgomery Township schools representatives, state representatives, district administrators, and ABC Federation of Teachers mentor.
ELRC general secretary Cindy Foca said the US-delegation was about 12 people coming to share best practices, and constituted university researchers, state representatives, teacher unions representatives, and school governing boards and practitioners at an ECD level and at high schools.
At this level, the programme is starting off by involving unions, but would extend beyond that.
The delegation was invited to share best practices, how they went about doing it, and what lessons could be learnt from it.
“We have a quintile system (in the country) so this programme in the US has been focused purely on your poor areas, because they wanted to demonstrate that those circumstances do not hinder the progress of the learners, but because the stakeholders are jointly formulating solutions to the problems that are confronting them.”
Unions present included the SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), the National Professional Teachers Union (Naptosa), the Suid-Afrikaanse Onderwysersunie (Saou) and the Professional Educators Union (PEU).
“It’s radical because we have always focused on bread and butter issues, where you bring the employer and the teacher unions, people only think about salary increases, incentives and so forth but in this case we’re saying we have a system which is the collective bargaining to deal with those. Now we want to put in a system that supports service delivery (ie learner performance).”
In her keynote address, Motshekga said the focus should be on teacher quality and labour relations.
“This focus on teacher quality is shared with the US, where policy discussions on the topic have dominated the past 14 years.
“Additionally, the strategic priorities of teaching and learning, with a primary emphasis on system quality, have become prominent.”
Motshekga said research from Rutgers University showed how unions can play a crucial role in school reform by collaborating with administrators to improve learning outcomes.