Education and Culture (ex- DEC) and ex-House of Delegates (ex- HOD) respectively. For the purpose of this study schools are referred to as follows: ex DET school - Blueberry school, ex DEC school - Mulberry school and ex HOD school Strawberry school.
3.6 J Description of schools
the local company and six faulty computers from Telkom. The school has electricity and telephone. Most parents of the learners are farm workers who are illiterate as a result the School Governing Body (SGB) is in place but not functional, only the chairperson does the functions of the governing body. Learners get food from the feeding scheme. Each class has a library and a science table since there is no library and no laboratory.
3.6.3.2 Mulberry School
Mulberry school is in a remote rural area, 49 km from Pietermaritzburg. It caters for the Black community, men of the area work in Johannesburg and learners stay with their mothers. The area is usually affected by faction fights. There are 692 learners and 19 educators, five of which are males including the principal. All educators of the school are not from the community, eight of them stay in the cottages of a nearby high school, where learners go after completing grade seven, eleven educators commute using a common transport. There is no electricity, water is obtainable from the tanks and the nearby river, there is a school telephone which is usually out of order.
On rainy days there is poor attendance because the nearby rivers, for example uMvoti, get flooded and there is no bridge. The school has a staffroom which has no furniture, educators hardly use it. The deputy principal utilises it because she has no office. The school does not have resources, the educators use books and the chalkboard as their teaching aids. For photocopying, they have to photocopy in a nearby town which is 9km from school and use their own money for both photocopying and transport which is very expensive. (Transport Rl 6 return journey and photocopying is 40c a copy). Educators are dedicated because even though they do not have resources they improvise and network with nearby schools, as a result there is a 10% increase in the pass rate from last year (2000) on the whole school.
The SGB is functional and meets once a month. The school is in the feeding scheme programme.
3.633 Strawberry School
This school is situated in a semi-urban area 38 km from Pietermaritzburg. Strawberry school previously catered for Indian pupils only, the staff also consisted of Indians.
Black learners were initially admitted in the school from 1994. These learners were admitted in the previous grade (the one they had passed) without any interviews, the criteria used was that all learners from previously disadvantaged schools were to follow this procedure.
This is a combined school, from grade one to grade 12. It has 937 learners and 33 educators. Out of this enrolment 610 are Black (65%) and from the staff only 12 (36%) are Black, 7 of which are permanent staff. In the School Management Team (SMT) there is no Black educator.
The school is a typical ex-HOD school, fully resourced. It has electricity, telephone, a library, a staff room and a computer room. Despite having the resources, the matric pass rate is not what is expected, although it has improved for the past three years. In
1999 it was 48%, 2000 it increased to 54% and in the year 2001 it was 58%. All the educators of the school are commuters but they all remain in the school for an hour after the departure of the learners. The SGB is in place, consists of only Indians, it is functional and meets once a month.
The sample
The sample of this study comprised of 16 participants, distributed as follows:
.1. From schools
Twelve (12) educators were selected from the three schools, each school had four participants. One from each grade in the foundation phase (grades 1,2 and 3) and 1 (one) from grade seven. All these educators had to have attended OBE workshops conducted either by facilitators at district level (delegates) or by their colleagues at school who had attended circuit workshops. In a school which had delegates, they were included in the study but still maintaining the number of educators per school to be four. These educators were adequate per school because each grade was represented.
What an educator of the grade presented was to be relevant to all members of the grade because in OBE educators of the grade assumed to be working as a team. They were expected to do both macro and micro planning together. The educators were selected for the study with the aim of determining the effectiveness of the workshops towards implementation of C2005. The data collected from them was on the workshops attended, principles informing OBE based C2005 addressed in the workshops, how the workshops prepared them for implementation and their confidence to implement C2005 after the workshops.
The delegates were to give information on the workshops attended and workshops at which they facilitated. They were also to mention who chose them and how they were chosen.
3.6.4.2 From the Department of Education 3.6.4.2.1 Subject Advisers
Two Subject Advisers from Pietermaritzburg region formed part of the study. The two Subject Advisers selected were involved in the cascading of OBE based C2005 in Umvoti Dstrict under which Mshwathi and Wartburg circuits are located. One of the Subject Advisers was the one representing Pietermaritzburg in Pretoria. Data collected from Subject Advisers was to answer critical questions of the research because they trained the delegates (they were the original people).
3.6.4.2.2 Senior Education Managers (SEMs)
SEMs of Mshwathi and Wartburg circuits were selected to be part of the study because one of their job descriptions is to monitor and coordinate the implementation of departmental policies. They were to give the criteria used for selecting the delegates in their circuits, how the cascading model was planned in their circuits and also what they consider to be the obstacles or problems affecting implementation.