The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) has denied allegations of only cutting contract teacher’s posts from schools in poor areas.
This after research and education consultant, Dr Seelan Naidoo claimed that over 400 public schools in the wealthy suburbs of Cape Town were spared from teacher job cuts.
He also accused the department of trying to conceal this information.
In August last year, provincial Education MEC, David Maynier announced that 2,407 teacher posts in public schools would be cut this month.
The department’s spokesperson, Kerry Mauchline says cuts were made using a post provisioning model given by national government.
“So, what happens. You have a computerized model that takes into account for each school, a whole lot of factors. It takes into account class sizes, workload of teachers, the size of the school, curriculum, the poverty of the surrounding areas and a couple of other factors. And so, when you change the total number of posts and reduce it, that’s naturally going to have an impact on that equation and can result in the school having fewer posts. So, to claim that its only rich schools that have not had post cuts is factually false,” Mauchline.
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