Fred Norman Secondary School learners taught under a tree as GDE fails to provide additional classrooms

Issued by Sergio Isa dos Santos MPL – DA Gauteng Spokesperson for Education
24 Aug 2022 in Press Statements

Some learners at the Fred Norman Secondary School in Ennerdale are forced to learn outside under a tree, due to the school not having sufficient classrooms. This has a negative impact on our learner’s education.

Valuable teaching time is also being lost because learners and teachers often have to wait for a classroom to become available for them to conduct their lessons.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) in Gauteng made this startling discovery during an oversight visit to the school earlier this week to access how learning and teaching take place at the school.

It was discovered that the reason for the inadequate number of classrooms is that the school is currently over capacity as the building is only meant to accommodate 950 learners but currently there are 2050 learners.

An application has been put forward for mobile classrooms but to date, this has not been delivered.

There are also severe infrastructure problems with the school. The gutters are broken, classrooms do not have proper flooring and learners sit on the desks because there are no chairs.

See pictures here and here

The safety of our learners is also at risk as the school does not have enough school patrollers and only has one person on duty during the day.

In addition, the school does not qualify for the feeding scheme because they are classified as a quintile five school and at the same time, they are also a no-fee-paying school.

The DA will be putting pressure on the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) and the Department of Infrastructure Development to urgently intervene in the current situation at the school.

No learner should be deprived of a proper education simply because the department has failed to put adequate measures in place to ensure that learning and teaching takes place in a conducive environment.