JEANNE VAN DER MERWE and THANDUXOLO JIKA THE State is flip-flopping over the release of the raw matric subject marks for the 2012 examinations. Umalusi, which is responsible for standardising the matric results prior to release, has provided unadjusted examination scores to Media24 Investigations for the past two years. But now it says this was… Read More »

JEANNE VAN DER MERWE THE CEO of one of South Africa’s biggest textbook companies and key ministerial advisor on the new school curriculum has penned more than 50 textbooks approved for use in the new school curriculum. Fathima Dada, the local CEO of publishing multinational Pearson, is a co-author on several readers, workbooks and teacher’s… Read More »

by Thanduxolo Jika THE brother of a top Limpopo state official scored at least R6,9m from a company which was awarded a R320m textbook distribution tender in which the official played a key role in deciding. The deal involving EduSolutions – a company owned and run by former top government mandarins – is the latest… Read More »

JEANNE VAN DER MERWE It cost the South African taxpayer R442,900 in 2011 to produce a single matriculant. That’s the outcome of a City Press study conducted with the help of prominent labour economist, Adcorp’s Loane Sharp. Sharp crunched 12 years of education budget and enrolment data to help us answer a simple question: what… Read More »

To calculate the cost of producing a single matriculant each year, Adcorp labour economist Loane Sharp argues that the aim of the education budget is to produce matric students.[data embedded lower down] “If we define ‘output’ as the number of students who passed matric and ‘total expenditure’ as the total spent on all grades up… Read More »

THANDUXOLO JIKA A Limpopo office “cleaner” was named as a Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) front to score a lucrative tender for the construction of a new school in Mthatha, Eastern Cape. Virginia Magaladi, the 30-year-old woman, has no clue about the details of the multimillion contract in which she is supposed to be a majority… Read More »

The education department’s new textbook policy could destroy a quarter of South Africa’s publishing industry, or half of the country’s capacity to create textbooks and other materials, the Publishers’ Association of South Africa says. But , as Jeanne Van Der Merwe reports, the government is sticking to its war on prices, charging South Africa’s textbooks… Read More »