The Brickdam Secondary School brouhaha is one of those irritating distractions inflicted upon us from time to time, but which invariably could be minimized through the application of good sense. However, we have to accept the fact that there are some patent weaknesses in the management of the affairs of our country which simply never seem to change.
Run-down schoolhouses that are potentially a hazard to the safety and health of their occupants are nothing new to our education system. Moreover, if you ask many heads of schools, teachers and parents they will tell you without the slightest hesitation that dilapidated and unsafe schoolhouses have not appeared to be a priority with the Ministry of Education. Some of the affected schoolhouses have been in pretty much the same state for several years. Teacher and parent protests have changed little, if anything.
The case of Brickdam Secondary would appear to be one of those ‘last- straw’ situations where, seized of the reality that there is simply no option, teachers girded their loins for a dramatic outpouring of resentment designed to secure public attention and support. The Ministry of Education’s antennae are finely tuned to these occasional excursions into brinkmanship by teachers and parents, and when they materialize it tends to trot out what are often poorly thought-out interventions aimed at quelling the outrage. That is as far as it usually goes. Longer-term, holistic solutions are rarely if ever forthcoming. That was the case, frequently, under the ministerial watch of Shaik Baksh.
The Fire Service, incidentally, had long passed judgement on the suitability of the premises housing the Brickdam school as a place of learning. The ministry, it would seem, did not share that opinion until recently. Here is one of those many cases that have to do with safety and health where government opted not to practise what it preaches. Had Brickdam Secondary been a private school faced with well-founded criticism of its suitability to deliver education to the nation’s children, the government would almost certainly have compelled immediate corrective measures or closure, long ago.
As it is, the ministry took belated action last week in response to the teachers’ sit-in, by hurriedly closing Brickdam near the end of a term, and dispersing the children and teachers to a number of other schools. That did not sit well with the parents, some of whom refused to collect the relocation slips for their children. They complained about the schools to which their children were being reassigned, the fact that they would not necessarily have their own teachers, as well as the fact that this was the time for assessments and examinations. The decision was reversed the following day.
Parents were told that the ministry was in the process of acquiring a piece of land, and that the construction of an entirely new school was contemplated. However, if indeed it materialises, it would take time, and there are concerns about what would happen in the meantime, since a new school will not appear before the opening of the new school year in September. Parents, it seems were not able to secure clarification on that.
We have already said that the Brickdam Secondary situation is not unique to the school system and that we believe it persists because of the latitude that is customarily afforded state entities in these matters. It is the same in other some government ministries and state agencies in matters of safety and health. Private sector entities are often pilloried over identical infractions. State entities frequently escape either official censure or demands for corrective action.
Part of the problem reposes in the fact that when difficulties in the school system have arisen the Ministry of Education has appeared not to have a viable solution, a circumstance that has meant that the problem has been allowed to fester. Violence in schools and student resistance to teacher authority are among the best examples of problems that have grown worse in the absence of well thought out approaches to dealing with them.
Brickdam Secondary would appear to be one of those instances in which it took one of those ‘last-straw’ protests to wrench an official response from the ministry which, when it came, was hasty, and as the ministry itself quickly discovered, unworkable. Mind you, it has to be said that unsuitable and run down schoolhouses are one of those occupational hazards of the ministry having to deliver education across the nation at the expense of the treasury. For as long as funding education delivery remains, primarily, a taxpayer responsibility in a limited economy like ours, the system is likely to remain resource challenged.
But that is only part of the equation. Scarce resources require the most prudent and enlightened management. Given the nature of the challenge confronting it the Ministry of Education (and it is not the only ministry or state agency facing that challenge) requires an experienced, talented, thoughtful and creative team of managers at its helm, equipped to provide a service that takes account of all of the broader aspects of what we loosely describe as education delivery. That includes ensuring the availability of all of the necessary inventory, including suitably appointed schoolhouses for education delivery.
The challenge, for example, of ensuring that schoolhouses across the country are kept in a state of readiness, structurally as well as in terms of teachers and teaching resources to meet the minimum standards necessary for an acceptable level of education delivery, given the aforementioned resource deficiencies, requires the application of high level of management skills, and long-term strategic planning and decision-making. One wonders whether these specialist skills are not less than readily available in the Ministry of Education where many of the senior functionaries are products of the teaching system whose professional training might not necessarily have equipped them – at least not in some instances ‒ for the highly specialized and demanding task of managing resource allocation in order to meet all of the many and varied needs of our education system.
Which brings us to the issue of last week’s high-level meeting between the President and permanent secretaries to unveil a strategic plan for government ministries. While little if anything has as yet been placed in the public domain about the strategic plan, it is worth wondering whether the initiative might not be designed (among other things) to strengthen the capacity of government ministries including the Ministry of Education, to address what in some instances may well be patent management challenges to which government has remained indifferent and which continually come back to haunt us. Hopefully, it is.
