Pretoria - A joint task team has been appointed by President Jacob Zuma to support work aimed at strengthening education in the Eastern Cape.
The task team, comprising members of Cabinet and the Provincial Executive Council, is mandated to deal with matters pertaining to the application of Section 100 (1) (b) on the Eastern Cape Department of Education. This is part of measures implemented by the President following his visit to the province to assess the state of education.
The move taken by the Presidency aims to supplement and strengthen the work of the Department of Basic Education to intervene in the areas of financial management as well as human resource management and planning in order to improve educational outcomes in the province.
In a statement, the Presidency noted that due to the urgency of the matter, the task team has already met and agreed to work closely together to deal with the challenges that had led to the intervention.
The challenges include a number of administrative issues, such as dealing with the general administrative shortcomings, which had led to the termination of the services of over 4 000 temporary teachers, leaving many schools with a shortage of teachers.
"There is a problem of scores of teachers that are additional to the establishment. In addition, the learner and teacher support materials had not been adequately delivered, the school nutrition programme had collapsed and scholar transport had come to a total halt in many areas," read the statement.
Following the President's visit in the province early last month, progress has been made. This includes a learner support programme which started on 27 June 2011 and intended to assist Grade 12 learners to catch up on lost learning opportunities during the first quarter of the academic year when the termination of temporary teachers' contracts left many of them without teachers.
The programme will run for the whole year until learners finish writing the end of the year examinations.