WCED releases preliminary findings into Maitland High textbook saga

Lusanda Bill
28 May 2015

An investigation conducted by the Western Cape Department of Education into the textbook saga at Maitland High School, has found among other things a glitch in the WCED online ordering system.

The preliminary investigation shows the school placed orders between July and August but due to the system glitch they did not receive the textbooks. Then the school failed to place another order between the 10th and 16th of February this year and only placed after the closing date.

Ministerial Spokesperson Jessica Shelver said there are a number of contributing factors that led to the non-delivery of textbooks. The WCED needs to highlight that schools need to have textbook retrieval policy to ensure that they retrieve a minimum of 95% of the textbooks back from learners at the end of the school year.  It is simply unsustainable to replace large numbers of textbooks every year.

Shelver said unfortunately many learners do not return the textbooks at the end of each year and schools have to use the Norms and Standards funds which many school simply cannot afford.

“Ultimately, the onus is on the school principal and management team to ensure that textbook are ordered timeously and that disruption to learning and teaching time is kept to a minimum” Schafer added. 

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