Lost in Transformation… ABC of the education crisis

Taking it out on the Springboks and the Proteas certainly won’t change things at the grass roots level, says Theo Garrun.

Johanensburg - I’m quite sure not many of you downloaded and read the status report on transformation in sport from the Eminent Persons Group on Transformation in Sport (EPG) for 2014/15.

I did, and I tried my very best to plough through it – it’s 136 pages long, poorly edited and full of repetition. It is also, however, an attempt to capture the facts about the state of transformation in sport and, of course, it was on the basis of what the report revealed that the Minister of Sport and Recreation decided to ban rugby, cricket, netball and athletics from hosting major international events.

A lot has been said about that and I’m not going there except to note that, according to the figures in the report, those four codes are not the worst of the bunch and that the reporting mechanisms of rugby and cricket were the best – so maybe they are victims of their own successes as far as that’s concerned.

I was, of course, most interested in the section on school sport and in light of the Minister’s explanation that the codes he sanctioned were guilty of not meeting their own, agreed-to targets, it certainly makes interesting reading.

It is stressed, repeatedly, that unless sport is introduced and effectively managed at all of the 28 000-odd schools in the country, there is little chance of ever achieving the Sports Transformation Charter’s main goal, which si to “ensure that the majority of South Africans are provided with the opportunity to participate and excel in sport both on and off the field of play, in a structured and organised manner”.

It’s all part of the wider education crisis – only some 4 000 of those 28 000 schools can be described as functional and you certainly are not going to get sport going at schools where very little teaching and learning is taking place and where the basics of any sporting programme: fields and facilities, coaching and organised competition, don’t exist.

There is a recognition by the drafters of the report that the development pipelines of rugby and cricket, in particular, focus on those 4 000 schools, most of them former Model C and private institutions, and that there is little chance of players outside of that system ever getting recognition.

So, what’s to be done?

Taking it out on the Springboks and the Proteas certainly won’t change things at the grass roots level and, as the Minister himself says in his foreword to the report: “As society and our government we must appreciate that the starting point of this report is the foundation, the bedrock of sports development, the school sport.

The report highlights organisational disarray and systemic weaknesses in the delivery of school sport in South Africa.” (sic).The situation is described as a two-silo problem.

There is a sports federation silo (department of sport) and a government sport (department of basic education) silo and, despite the existence of a memorandum of understanding between the departments of sport and recreation and basic education, they have not done much between them to get sport going in the schools.

What should happen in terms of that agreement is quite clear:

*70 percent of those actively involved in organising school sport should be teachers; lteachers should be retrained to run school activities, and paid extra because sport is an overtime activity;

*phys ed teachers can’t run the programmes themselves – they must play a co-ordinating role;

*geographic boundary and jurisdiction issues must be resolved and la provision strategy for sports facilities needs to be developed.

There are all sorts of reasons why those things aren’t happening, not the least of which is resistance from the teacher unions and an attitude that organising sport is simply not part of a teacher’s job.

The recommendation is the establishment of an over-arching school sport organising structure and an insistence that teachers should roll up their sleeves and do their jobs.Not such an simple task, and not one that’s going to yield transformative results anytime soon. Much easier to lash the high-profile national teams who get all the media attention.

*The EPG status report on transformation in sport can be downloaded from the department of sport’s website: www.srsa.gov.za/

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