Pupils at some schools across KwaZulu-Natal returned home again with empty exercise books today, having sat idle at their desks for a second week.
|||Pupils at some schools across KwaZulu-Natal will return home again today with empty exercise books, having sat idle at their desks for a second week.
Worried and angry parents and principals said they could do nothing but wait for lessons to resume.
This was because some South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) members had stopped teaching at a number of schools, despite being asked to work-to-rule.
The union is on a go-slow to demand that Education Minister Angie Motshekga and her director-general, Bobby Soobrayan, resign after they retracted a collective bargaining agreement on a salary increase for matric markers.
The impact of the unofficial boycott has extended to student teachers, some of whom have experienced difficulty teaching the lessons they need to in order to earn their university qualifications.
Yesterday, a Greyville parent said her daughter in Grade 4 had spent the school day “playing”.
“It’s unfair for me to have to pay for private tutoring when I’m already paying school fees. I’m not sure whether what I’m teaching her at home is right or wrong,” she said.
A parent of a Grade 11 pupil who attends a Chatsworth school was anxious that his son’s tertiary education prospects were in jeopardy, as only accounting and maths teachers were fulfilling their duties.
The principal of the same school wrote a letter to parents, informing them that Sadtu members were “engaged in a chalk-down”, but that pupils were being “supervised and monitored”.
A Mariannhill primary school principal said his staff were “just sitting” in their classrooms. “There is chaos. Kids are not coming to school.”
Reginald Chiliza, chairman of the Association of School Governing Bodies of KZN, said that Sadtu’s work-to-rule campaign had escalated at many schools.
“Teachers are going to class, and sitting and doing nothing. The children of the person they are trying to punish do not go to these schools,” Chiliza said, referring to Motshekga.
Neil Avery, a lecturer at the University of KZN’s school of education, said some student teachers had been told by staff at certain schools that they were “not teaching”.
He believed this flew in the face of what the students were taught about professionalism.
“It is not a good advertisement,” he said.
Avery said that in his conversations with students, teachers expressed being torn between performing their duties, and being seen as sell-outs.
“There’s a great deal of pressure on them to conform with what a site steward or local union branch says.”
Avery said there was discord between what Sadtu was saying and what was happening in the schools.
Sadtu KZN deputy secretary Nomarashiya Caluza denied that some members had stopped teaching.
Asked what the Provincial Education Department was planning to do about schools where teaching had been completely disrupted, spokesman Muzi Mahlambi said it had not received such reports.
The Basic Education Department has called today’s union marches in Pretoria and Cape Town – in which the union’s KZN leadership would participate – illegal. It has warned that it would dock salaries, and that teachers who signed attendance registers but left to join the protest action would be disciplined.