Barb: The National Department of Basic Education is the body responsible for all schools grade R to grade 12. Schooling is compulsory between the ages of seven and 15 years and in terms of the constitution all learners are guaranteed access to quality education. There are two types of schools independent (private) and public.
The Dept is responsible for education across the country as a whole while each of the nine provinces has its own education dept. Provinces are like our states. The central government provides a national framework for school policy, but administrative responsibility lies with the provinces. Power is further devolved to grassroots level via elected school governing bodies, which have a significant say in the running of their schools.
The discussion about the evolution of the issue of education in general and early education specifically was fascinating in the context of this relatively new government. While the issues are very similar to issues in Minnesota (quality, access, unequal service delivery, multiple departments not working together or struggling to work together, not having an effective and efficient delivery system), they appear to have made major strides in addressing many of these issues since 2005. Certainly not without continued challenges, but different in how depts are being held to specific outcomes through what appear to me to be innovative cross-agency structuring and accountability. They have developed some very sophisticated infrastructure, plans to assure collaboration, integrated monitoring frameworks and evaluation tools using research pilots to provide feedback quickly to various departments at the province level on how they are doing to meet various outcomes. They also are designing integrated data-marts to collect cross dept data. Very impressive and frank discussions about progress and challenges.
