FOREWORD by Dr Tim Nuttall

Changing the paradigm: it is up to us

This foreword is written during the month of the FIFA World Cup, hosted by South Africa – the first time that this mega-event has occurred on African soil. An event of this magnitude attracts its fair share of controversy, but here I wish to dwell on the way it has changed the paradigms – the worldviews – of South Africans.

I sat with my family behind the goals in the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, watching Côte d’Ivoire play Portugal. We were sitting in the ‘South African’ ticketed seats and from the time of kick-off it was obvious that most of us in that large crowd were supporting the African team. The shouts and blasts of vuvuzelas signalled a continental connection which was real, in new ways. It has been interesting and pleasing watching my sixteen year-old son gaining an identity as an African supporter, rather than just a South African supporter, in his enthusiasm for, and knowledge about, the Ivorian and Ghanaian teams. His view of himself, and his continent, has been changed and enlarged.

I was driving in central Polokwane at midday on Wednesday 9 June, the day that Bafana Bafana were enjoying a parade of honour through a massive crowd in central Johannesburg. A national call had gone out for South Africans to gather in support and celebration of the national team and the start of the FIFA World Cup. In Polokwane and elsewhere – I saw on television later – large enthusiastic crowds gathered to celebrate the moment. As I joined in the hooting, cheering and waving I thought about how we as humans love the prospect of new possibilities. I had a flashback to being in a very different kind of crowd in October 1989: the freedom march through Pietermaritzburg’s streets, when hundreds of thousands of South Africans claimed the country for a different future, for hope beyond apartheid.

The black man from Soweto wore a T-shirt with an Orlando Pirates logo on it. But closer inspection revealed that the words on his chest read ‘Orlando Bulls’. Next to him stood a white man from Pretoria, his face painted light blue in the colours of a Blue Bulls supporter, announcing that this was his first visit to Soweto and that after the game he was going to celebrate in a Vilakazi street tavern. If the FIFA World Cup is a paradigm shift for South Africans, the two Super 14 Rugby games played in Orlando Stadium just before the soccer extravaganza have also altered the way we South Africans view ourselves.

I could go on, for it is a heady moment to be a South African, with echoes of many landmarks in our recent past as a country seeking new futures.

During this ‘moment’ I have just completed a tour of the nine pilot schools of the Historic Schools Restoration Project (HSRP), working as a consultant to enhance capacity for improved teaching and learning. In ways similar to FIFA expecting South Africans to build stadia and organise a World Cup tournament according to defined standards of excellence, the HSRP has identified these nine schools as places to ‘lift their game’. The HSRP is an agency of external expectation, and it is a source of resources – human and material – which promises to add capacity to the vision of ‘restoration’.

Restoration requires a willing paradigm shift, a conscious decision in the present to restore something which had an existence in the past. The process of restoration is unlikely to create an exact replica, for the purposes of the present are seldom the same as those of the past. Restoration is inspired by the past, but is more about changing the present and its future.

The pilot schools are at different places across a spectrum of quality, giving rise to a mix of restorative requirements. Each institution has its own particular set of experiences and personalities in the past and the present, which shape how it lives out its educational mission. Schools are physical spaces, with grounds and buildings, requiring capital expenditure, maintenance and master-planning. Schools are organisational and human communities, places of identity, emotion and belonging. Schools are places of teaching and learning, inside and outside the classroom. Across this matrix, each HSRP pilot school has its distinctive mix of constraints and opportunities.

Given this diversity, the paradigm shift of restoration involves a range of responses and challenges across the nine schools. For some, there has already been a remarkable process of turnaround and rebuilding, and the role of HSRP is to add energy and momentum. At the other end of the spectrum, there are schools which need systemic reform and a change of organisational culture. Here, there could be a more strategic role for HSRP in pushing for, and enabling, restoration towards significantly better futures. To use the FIFA World Cup as a metaphor, some schools need refurbishment as existing stadia, while others need the building of a new stadium.

Since its inception, the HSRP has organised its work around physical planning and infrastructure, on the one hand, and educational processes, on the other. The plans for physical restoration have been drawn up and costed, and the future challenges are to source the necessary funding, and then to implement the plans in logical phases. During 2008 and 2009, the nine schools were evaluated through the expertise of the Independent Quality Assurance Agency, working with school staff. The future challenges are to develop education plans, with clear goals and responsibilities for action. In order to proceed with the physical and infrastructural dimensions of restoration the schools are generally reliant on external funding. To proceed with raising the educational bar, the schools have the opportunity and the responsibility to take control of their futures, to develop and change the paradigms of performance in dynamic ways.

With the educational and organisational paradigm in mind, there are a number of core aspects which, I argue, need to be addressed if the pilot schools are to rise to the challenges of their past and the expectations of their future. These aspects are stated here as statements; the question is how far the school meets them. There is strong and visionary leadership, both in management and governance, which embodies the vision and purposes of the school. Teachers are well grounded in their subjects and motivated by a professional calling and code. The school is a place of welcome and care, both for staff and students. The basic routines and rhythms of the school function effectively and smoothly. Learning is active and takes place in classrooms, grounds and buildings which are attractive and well-managed. The school is not an island, but connected to the wider world and community.

By the time this report is published, the FIFA World Cup will have come and gone. There will be many dimensions to its legacy: this or that game or goal will be talked about and remembered; the new facilities will be there to be used and managed; the tourist industry will have shifted up a gear. Our perceptions of ourselves as South Africans will have been challenged and broadened. The extent to which the positively changed paradigms associated with the FIFA World Cup grow and develop will be up to us South Africans to determine as we continue to address the many challenges and opportunities of our society, economy and nation.

In a similar vein, the restoration of the historic schools promotes positively changed paradigms. It is up to all those associated with this worthy project – in government, businesses, universities, NGOs, and especially in education departments and the pilot schools themselves – to respond with determination and vigour to the legacies of the past and the obligations of the future. It is up to us.