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Safety in schools being reviewed - Newsroom - 05-08-2015
Considerable attention has been paid to the matter of school violence over the past five years, the Department of Basic Education says.
The department is in the process of reviewing and amending the Regulations for Safety Measures at Public Schools, which says safety risk assessments must be conducted twice a year, school safety plans must be developed by all schools, there must be supervision of learners during and after official school activities and access control measures must be in place.
The National School Safety Framework (NSSF) was approved in April 2015 and the training of identified provincial master trainers in all nine provinces commenced on 29 June and will be completed by the end of August 2015.
The NSSF provides an important instrument through which minimum standards for safety at school can be established, implemented and monitored.
Also, an exemplar code of conduct has been developed by the department and distributed to all provinces to serve as an example for schools to develop their own context specific codes of conduct for learners.
Drug testing guidelines have been developed through support of UNICEF and distributed to all provinces for implementation.
Deputy Director General for Care and Support at the department, Granville Whittle, said this when he briefed the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education about violence in schools on Tuesday.
He said while the department was dealing with the issue of violence in schools, achieving safe school environments would only be likely to happen when school safety was integrated as a fundamental component of local safety strategies.
“School violence is undergirded by a myriad of individual, school, family and broader community-level risk factors that coalesce to create vulnerability for violence. Any attempt to curb violence occurring in schools needs to extend beyond the school itself.â€
He said parental and community support, including prevention and early intervention, were the most reliable and cost-effective ways to support school safety.
There should be a commitment of parents and community members, with defined roles and responsibilities, to monitor boundaries, entrance and egress points at specific times of days.
He told Members of Parliament that experiences of violence at school, and related to the school environment, were common throughout the country.
The presence of police in schools had been shown to increase mistrust in the police, undermine respect for authority, negatively affect concentration and school performance, as well as often leading to profiling and targeting of certain at-risk learners who require interventions other than those bringing them into contact with the law.
Whittle said armed security guards often assumed the role of police and had no effect in identifying and mediating potential conflict, and have been shown to have little effect in preventing gun violence.
He said the zero-tolerance approaches to drugs, alcohol and violence also did not address root causes.
“Zero tolerance approaches are more likely to exclude children from the formal education system, increasing risk of further and more serious contact with the law.†– SAnews.gov.za