Plans are finally afoot to expand a school that is so overcrowded it has up to 120 pupils in a class.
It took parents shutting down Tinley Manor Primary School and keeping their children at home for two weeks for the Department of Education to attended to the overcrowding.
Sphamandla Khumbuza, the branch secretary of the ANCYL for the area, said the representatives from the department’s infrastructure unit had promised that the construction tender advert would go out next month, and that construction would start in August.
The ANCYL in the area has been leading the community since 2004 in their battle to get the school – which only has nine permanent classrooms – expanded.
It was only in 2012 that 11 mobile classrooms for the approximately 1 400 pupils in grades 1 to 7 were put in place.
“The department also committed in writing that the school will be getting more mobile classrooms next week. We are not sure if all they have promised will happen, but it is written down with signatures, so we trust that for now,” said Khumbuza.
Education spokesman Kwazi Mthethwa cautioned principals against admitting more children than there was capacity for at their schools.
Mthethwa said Tinley Manor Primary was already on the list of prioritised schools for the next financial year, which would start next month.
Presenting the 2017/18 budget in May last year, Education MEC Mthandeni Dlungwana said the school infrastructure budget would be mainly used for upgrades and additions as part of addressing overcrowding.
The department allocated the second-highest amount of it’s R47 million budget to infrastructure development, and had 1 719 upgrades and additions
projects.
Education analyst Professor Labby Ramrathan, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said resolving overcrowding was more complex than just building new classrooms.
“There is an uneven distribution because some schools have very low enrolment.”
In the past, Ramrathan said, there had been school expansions only for population dynamics to change and enrolment to dip.
He said schools with good reputations were also favoured over others, leading to a larger enrolment at those schools versus
ones that did not perform as well.
“What needs to happen is that at a district level they need to find ways to balance enrolment, so that the schools in the district will not be under burdened and others overburdened,” said Ramrathan.
However, he said KZN definitely needed classrooms, more facilities and more teachers, particularly if a workable teacher-pupil ratio was to be maintained.