Chief Director: Inclusive Education, Extra Ordinary Professor
Western Cape Education Department
Total des années d'expérience :23 years, 4 Mois
I am involved in policy development, teacher education and overseeing the implementation of the curriculum from grades R-12. My tasks also involve developing curriculum packages as well as designing programmes that respond to the challenges that face the Department of Education, for example, the literacy and numeracy strategy as well as the Science and Mathematics strategy. I am also required to supervise and work closely with a number of curriculum planners and advisors. My task also involves special needs/inclusive education and developing programmes that deal with special education needs. For example, I have help design, supervise and implement the South African Sign Language Programme in the Western Cape. Budgeting, project management as well as monitoring and evaluation is key to my task.
I assisted in developing White Paper 6 on Special Needs Education: Building an Inclusive Education and Training System. My task was to implement the White Paper in South Africa. I was responsible for the overall management, budget and operational issues relating to implemetation for a period of 4 and a half years
the aim of this research was to establish how successfully schools in the Foundation Phase (Grades 1-3), where training and implementation of OBE has been completed, were able to reach the goals of OBE. As part of a broader goal, this investigation attempted to clarify whether the inclusionary approach of OBE was working in primary schools in the Foundation Phase based on its central premise that all students can learn and succeed, but not on the same day and in the same way. More specifically, this investigation attempted to establish (i) How successfully had the 66 specific outcomes been implemented in Grade 1 and Grade 2? (ii) What was the level of success of implementation in the different learning areas? (iii) What was the level of success in the implementation of mastery learning? (iv) How many learners had been moved from special education sites to regular education sites? (v) Did schools have the resources to deal with diversity? (vi) Had there been sufficient human resource development to ensure teachers had been trained to deal with diversity? and (vii) Did teachers feel they could teach all learners? In order to arrive at the above-mentioned aim, this study included a survey in a sample of primary schools in the Western Cape. A survey was conducted in 108 primary schools which constitutes 10% of the primary schools in the Western Cape Province. The 108 schools wer chosen based on the socio-economic and rural/urban considerations. The study made several findings which included: (i) OBE was badly implemented in poor areas and favoured the more affluent schools, (ii) minimal progress had been made with regard to Inclusive education, (iii) limited resources existed for the poorest schools, (iv) conceptual and implementation flaws in the curriculum and implemetation of the curriculum and (v) the implementation of OBE was generally poor.
