##### Convention Declaration

On 11 and 12 September 2023, a meeting of over 300 delegates representing government officials, the private sector, teacher unions, teachers, universities, community leaders and the media met at Birchwood, Benoni, to engage with over 60 national and international experts on collaborative education improvement experiences coordinated by the NECT in past 10 years and to jointly explore the future of education in South Africa.

The Convention reflected and deliberated on numerous topics organised under the four categories: district and school improvement; systemic improvement programming; the use of policy instruments to drive improvement; and partnerships and collaboration for supporting education improvement.

A mix of opportunities, challenges and commitments for collaborative education improvement were highlighted:

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1. Overarching Observations

The convention acknowledged with appreciation the success of the education collaboration and the collaboration model that was established through the NECT, which–

1. Galvanised the national focus on education improvement, channelled boundless critical energies and social capital to uplift teacher and management knowledge, complemented the expertise in the Department of Basic Education, and connected the South African national policy process to global developments, especially those which are spearheaded by the Global North.
2. Contributed significantly to supporting the improvement of basic teaching methodologies across the over 200 000 classrooms of our education system. The daily structured learning programmes are a case in point.
3. Achieved the rollout of development initiatives that reached about 25% of the approximately 500 million teachers in the 10 years and over 60% of the approximately 3600 subject curriculum advisors in the national system.

Supported system stability and the adoption of new thinking about improvement, complemented delivery capacity and played a critical role in managing the negative effects of COVID-19 on education in South Africa, to the extent that our schools reopened in a few weeks compared to periods extending up to two years in some countries.

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2. Exploration of the Future and Taking the Opportunity to Build Back Better

The Convention noted the tension between keeping the integrity of the education system as we have known it for the past centuries, and the future which is fast changing and as we anticipate.

1. The Convention noted the efforts of the DBE to strengthen the curriculum and the restructuring of the programmes, including the addition of the vocational programmes as the third stream and the introduction of the ‘School of Specialisation Initiative’, which have taken root in some provinces.
2. The active role of the private sector in the School of Specialisation and curriculum strengthening initiatives, particularly in Gauteng, was noted and appreciated. Additional effort will be made to bring more private sector players into these initiatives. The team driving the curriculum strengthening process will also consider and communicate its proposed priorities, change management approaches and ways in which evidence will be used to drive implementation, with due care of the constrained budgetary environment.
3. Greater alignment was recommended between DBE and DHET in relation to teacher education.;

A sector-wide conversation was proposed to discuss and reach agreement on the role of structured learning programmes in the system.

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3. District and Schools

The Convention noted the proposals to strengthen the district discourse and their capacities to drive education improvement with increased levels of priority on Foundational Learning: Reading, Writing and Mathematics. The districts’ role is critical because it will bring about change at scale by leveraging the already available, paid-for district capacities, authorities and proximity to schools. The following points were further noted and acknowledged:

1. Budget constraints, which are exacerbated by the post-COVID-19 economic downturn. Efficient, effective and sustainable innovations will thus be necessary over and above ensuring major budget reductions.
2. Consideration of the risks associated with limited resourcing of the current districts from material and human resourcing perspectives (including the quality of district staff), greater focus and prioritisation in district planning and operations to limit administrative burden, an overweighed upwardly accountability of districts and the need to improve district-school level relationships to address high deficiencies of trust.

A dual district change approach is recommended. This involves leveraging the districts while continually building district capacity (refer to the IDIP model) and ensuring that accountability is 360.

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4. System Programming and Policy

The Convention noted the centrality of the systems level and its capacity in driving improvement in schools in a sustainable way. The convention further noted that –

1. The simple existence of policy does not change education improvement; its practice does. Therefore, sets of policy instruments should be adaptable to the context, i.e. COVID-19 response.
2. Large-scale interventions should be anchored in better understanding and buy-in of the approach by participants, and programme design should be informed by data, local and international learning and local imperatives.
3. The implementation of change initiatives should acknowledge that education reform takes time. Therefore, it should stick to timelines and deliberately capitalise on successes and failures. Improvement initiatives should strengthen central archiving and information management.
4. In driving systems change, greater care should be given to ensuring sufficient budgets, capacitating people and putting systems in place. Focusing on only one or two change elements will not bring about sustainable change.
5. The education sector needs to explore secondments for building technical capacity for government and NGOs, to learn to plug into DBE processes and systems rather than working parallel to the system.
6. Planning and resourcing should heed the need for a demographic balance in the system – age, race, gender and regionalism.
7. The decoupling of the former education department into the Department of Higher Education and Training and the Department of Basic Education has weakened the necessary continuity of planning, implementation and monitoring of the education and training service.

Collaborations in education need to be careful to not conflate pilots with actual implementation and increased teaching practice.

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5. Partnerships and Collaboration

1. The functionality of partnerships depends on the clarity of the education improvement vision and priorities which should be set out by the DBE and its various tiers, especially the province and districts with their circuits. Clear prioritisation of initiatives of government will assist in focusing partnership support and avoiding mission creep, confusing messages to schools and the dissipation of the leverage potential of the partnership inputs.
2. The DBE should be regarded as the leader of the partnership (and collaboration) and expected to lead the work. More detailed guidelines are required in this regard.
3. There is a need to strengthen and reinforce impact metrics based on the perspectives of effectiveness and gains in initiatives.

Teacher unions and principal associations play an important role in developing teachers and management. There is a need to establish collaboration with neglected sectors such as professional associations. Unions should be brought to the table at the beginning of the improvement process rather than at the tail end of the consultation

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6. In Conclusion

The NDP targets should be revisited to ensure that they are more realistic and benchmarked against context, especially given the post-COVID challenges, notably learning losses and budgetary constraints.