The Gauteng Department of Education plans to strengthen its training of schools and teachers in the province to maximise, strengthen and sustain its ICT rollout programme is public schools.

MEC for Education, Panyaza Lesufi, delivered his budget speech yesterday in Johannesburg.

The department’s total budget for the 2017/18 financial year is R40.8 billion, an increase of R1.7 billion from the previous year.

Since launching Paperless Classrooms in 2015, 1861 Grade 12 classrooms had been converted to smart classrooms. The conversion of 1765 Grade 11
classrooms was completed in the last financial year. ICT is currently enabled in all Grade 11 and 12 schools in the 377 no-fee schools and in future, all new schools constructed will be ICT-enabled and all schools that achieve a 100% pass rate automatically become smart schools.

“Our experience in implementing the smart schools programme over the last three years has been that teachers have overall embraced it with much enthusiasm…We recognised from the beginning that the ICT programme would rise or fall on the strength of our teachers’ abilities. So, whilst we have made massive investments in terms of ICT infrastructure, devices and so on, we have equally ensured that we source the best expertise to assist with this specialised content development and provide the kind of teacher training and ongoing on-site support that would realise the vision of transformed classroom practice,” Lesufi said.

To ensure sustainability, the department has included School Management Teams (SMT) and School Governing Bodies in training programmes.

Together with its partners in the Department of eGovernment, Gauteng Education is looking into developing an educational portal and cloud access, which will allow all other schools not targeted as part of the rollout in the short term, to connect with their own devices and access educational content that is aligned to the curriculum.

The department will further commission an independent, external evaluation of the ICT and elearning programme, so that it can account for the massive investment made, gather best practices from the implementation to date and review ways in which it can further strengthen the implementation.