{"id":2424,"date":"2011-02-25T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/amabhungane\/stories\/state-schools-foot-governments-bill\/"},"modified":"2011-02-25T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-25T00:00:00","slug":"state-schools-foot-governments-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/state-schools-foot-governments-bill\/","title":{"rendered":"State schools foot government’s bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

State schools have had to spend thousands of rands from their own budgets making photocopies of the annual national assessment tests (ANAs) — despite the department of basic education spending more than R12-million to outsource the job.<\/p>\n

In November last year the department called for bids to “print, distribute and store” the ANAs. It then awarded the contract to a joint venture between Lebone Litho Printers, Paarl Media and City Deliveries for R12.3- million.<\/p>\n

But dozens of schools have told the Mail & Guardian<\/em> that they were left to print or photocopy test papers themselves at the beginning of February after department district offices did not have the correct number of papers available.<\/p>\n

ANA tests measure pupils’ foundation skills in literacy and numeracy. They provide the department with a national snapshot of education performance.<\/p>\n

A principal from a school in Botshabelo in the Free State said R1 050 had been spent on photo- copying the test papers. “I tried to communicate with the district office, but they gave us no explanation. I had to run around the district using my own transport to try to get the papers copied in time.”<\/p>\n

At least five different principals from the Free State also complained about having to foot the bill for making their own copies.<\/p>\n

Lebone Litho and Paarl were also awarded a R250-million contract at the end of 2010 to publish and distribute maths and English workbooks to all government schools.<\/p>\n

Last month the M&G<\/em> flagged a potential conflict of interest between Lebone Litho and the department.<\/p>\n

Basic education director general Bobby Soobrayan is engaged to Fathima Hendricks, the daughter of former education department official Salama Hendricks, who co-owns Lebone Group Holdings, a sister company of Lebone Litho.<\/p>\n

The department said that Soobrayan had nothing to do with the awarding of either tender.<\/p>\n

A principal from a primary school in Boksburg told the M&G<\/em> that his school received only a few copies of the papers. “For the rest they gave us a CD and we had to print them ourselves. It cost us a lot of money.”<\/p>\n

Another principal in Mamelodi said: “We were referred to other schools to get the original to make a copy from them. The district officers told us the problem was at a national level.”<\/p>\n

Ezrah Ramasehla, president of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa, said: “We have heard of schools in Gauteng in particular which have had to copy the tests themselves. School A would get some of the papers but school B wouldn’t. So we had situations where school B would have to go to school A and make photocopies.”<\/p>\n

Lebone chief executive Keith Michael said this was yet another case of people causing “mischief” against his company. Michael referred queries to the department.<\/p>\n

Department of education spokesperson Granville Whittle told the M&G<\/em> that they “are aware” that schools were given CDs to print their own papers, saying only that “this happened in certain instances”.<\/p>\n

Asked whether the tender had been changed in relation to whether schools would have to photocopy or print their own ANA tests, Whittle said no changes had been made.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

This article was produced by amaBhungane, investigators of the M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit initiative to enhance capacity for investigative journalism in the public interest. www.amabhungane.co.za<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Government schools spend thousands photocopying test papers meant to be supplied by the department of education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24367,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}