Last week, the Chamber hosted an interesting, and as it transpired, a very useful event. School Trade, within the PCB membership, is an organisation that brokers corporate social investment projects in schools. By getting to know the schools well and assessing their critical needs, Colin McKay, is able to seek companies that are willing and able to assist them.
Thursday’s gathering consisted of a number of people representing eight primary schools of varying degrees of deprivation relative to the advantaged schools of what we might call the city area. Each school had been asked, with Colin’s help, to identify a project which might have attractive affordability and, if supported, would definitely make a significant difference to the life of the school and the education of the children. Present to hear about the schools’ needs were a number, but not as many as we would have liked, of business people. There were several things that struck me about the short presentations. The most obvious was the vast difference between education in the privileged areas and that in areas of disadvantage. While one school may raise funds to install a new astroturf hockey field or send its first team abroad, there is a school not far away, ostensibly teaching the same curriculum to young people enjoying equitable opportunity in a democratic country, where funds are required to partition a room so that three classes may be taught without them all sharing a single, very confined space. A hundred and fifty young learners (in the early grades) occupy a space of less than twenty square metres in three classes of about fifty each. And I remember teachers complaining about teaching both higher and standard grade together in a class of twenty-five!
Another school has to close if it rains because the adjacent river becomes too dangerous for the young learners to wade through in order to get home. This school requires a footbridge over the river so as to obviate the problem. Another is growing vegetables to supplement the departmental feeding scheme. In poor areas where there are many child-headed households, who knows how much intellectual and academic potential is wasted because children are hungry and under-nourished. The school wishes to improve its cooking facilities; it has nowhere to keep food fresh, and relies on woodfires to provided energy. So much more could be done with a fridge and a stove. One school has been given a number of computers, but they stand idle because there are no power points in the room and the school cannot afford to have plugs installed. Yet another, somewhat better off among these schools, wishes to improve its library and resource centre by laying a concrete floor and putting in ceilings. By way of comparison, Alexandra High School had under-floor heating, not that this was ever used in the ten years I spent there. An appeal for toys to help formative grade learners to count and improve their numeracy skills was heart-rending when one realised that without these aids, which we take so much for granted, there will be little mathematics skills among those young people.
The teacher-presenters were all imbued with two vital qualities. They were innovative and passionate about improving the conditions of the school and one had to admire their commitment at a time when so many teachers, it seems, are not ‘called’ to engage in a noble profession.
What good news it was to realise that all eight projects were promised support from the business community. But how sad to realise that the iniquity of inequality persists, despite the vast amounts of money spent by the state on education.
Andrew Layman: PCB CEO
This article appeared in the Public Eye on the 3 July 2008
