Too many in the district offices?

HARDLY a day goes by without some reporting on the Education Department's inability to fulfil its constitutional obligation to the people of this country. Court orders are ignored, teachers not paid, textbooks not delivered – the list is endless.

Surely some investigative journalism can uncover the real reasons behind this total lack of intent of the department to fulfil its obligation to the children of this country, especially the poor children who have no chance of being taught at the former Model C schools. Make no mistake, most of the former Model C schools also face huge challenges, but they by and large have active and functioning management structures in place and don't wait for the department, they just get on with the job at hand.

These last two weeks have seen the district office in Uitenhage shutting shop, citing overcrowding and poor working conditions.

This begs the question of how is it that there are too many staff in these offices and the schools are closed because of too few teachers?

An investigation will show that most of these staff in the district office are former teachers now doing admin work. It will also be interesting to see how many support staff there are for every teacher in this district.

The statistics are available and I'm pretty sure will reflect that the department does not have too few teachers, it's just that they are sitting, sorry, standing around in district offices no longer teaching. The reasons for the migration to the district office by teachers are complex – I'm sure money and union affiliation play their part.

Come on, The Herald journalists, start digging and I'm sure you will uncover lots of reasons why there is no need to struggle with poor education 20 years into the new South Africa.

Intrigued, Port Elizabeth