To: The Western Cape MECs of Education, Community Safety, Social Development, SAPS WC and the Premier of the Western Cape

Respond to our demands for #SAFESCHOOLS

We are calling on the MEC to respond the demands of Equalisers:

1. Honour the request of Equalisers to attend a Public Hearing

2. The WCED, SAPS and other relevant government departments need to coordinate their efforts and work together more closely on the issue of school safety:
- If there is already joint work taking place between SAPS and the WCED, they must explain to learners, parents and teachers what they are doing, why it isn’t working and what they are going to do to improve it.
- Going forward, this inter-departmental work shouldn’t take place on an ad hoc basis as a response to specific situations, but through formally established joint committees and structures at every level of government from provincial government down to SGBs and police stations.
- These structures should also be accessible to civil society and individual school communities so as to keep politicians and officials accountable to the people they are meant to serve.

3.The WCED, together with the Department of Transport and Public works and other relevant agencies, should make scholar transport available for learners attending afternoon classes and activities, not just for learners who go home straight after school:
- Learners who do extra classes and extra-murals have to walk or hitch rides home and this exposes them to crime and violence. Our audit shows that we are unsafe on the way to school and on the way home, especially while walking.

4. Every teacher and learner needs proper education about rape, sexual assault, gender-based violence and issues of consent:
- The DBE and WCED must make sure that the LO curriculum is used properly to educate school communities about these topics.
- This should happen from ECD and primary school-level all the way to matric.

5.The WCED needs to make more serious efforts to end the practice of corporal punishment:
- This should include efforts to engage parents throughout the province – many schools get away with corporal punishment because our parents don’t know that it is illegal for a teacher to beat learners.
- The WCED should speak to principals and teachers in township and rural schools who succeed without using corporal punishment and help other schools to learn from them.
- Alternative methods like detention and cleaning of school premises should be implemented, but the WCED should also provide transport for learners who are disciplined in this way so that teachers can use these methods without endangering the lives of learners.
- Verbal assault should also be considered illegal; teachers need support to use forms of discipline that are not abusive.

6. The WCED and the Department of Community Safety must explain why they don’t pay for all schools to have proper security guards.

7. SAPS must patrol the routes that learners walk to get to and from school:
- This doesn’t happen for all school routes and this makes learners vulnerable to crime and violence.

8. The Minister of Police and the SAPS leadership in the province must deal with the issue of inequality in SAPS resource allocation urgently:
- We can no longer tolerate apartheid-era resource allocation, where areas like Rondebosch and Camp’s Bay have more police officers and resources per person than areas like Nyanga, Grassy Park, Mbekweni and Delft.
- 31 young people were killed in gang violence in Delft, just in August. What are SAPS and the Western Cape Government doing about youth gangs? Recommendation 12 of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry must be properly implemented.

9. We demand that the national government must put together a plan and a budget to provide pads and dignity packs to all learners who need them – these should be compulsory, same as with textbooks and stationery:
- The companies that sell these pads must also agree to lower their prices so that the government can more easily afford to implement this plan.

Why is this important?

For over two years, EE members all over the Western Cape have been organising for better safety and sanitation conditions in their schools. After a process of debate and discussion, EE members identified these two issues as major challenges to quality education in the province. Many learners feel that they cannot receive quality education under conditions in which they feel unsafe and which lack dignified sanitation.

In order to understand the depth of these issues, and to hold the WCED accountable for their responsibilities toward our schools, EE together with different community organisations has audited the state of safety and sanitation in schools around the Western Cape. In addition to assisting in this survey, we encourage you to report any outstanding issues directly to the WCED.

A social audit report has been produced since the audit and this report has been presented to the WCED. Meetings and various engagements have taken place with no resolution that will influence policy and affect change thus meaning our campaign is still in progress.

EE members also understand the challenges that issues of safety and sanitation create for teachers and principals. Teachers struggle to teach when learners don’t have access to sanitation. Teachers struggle to teach when learners’ behaviour is affected by traumatic experiences with crime and violence in the community. Principals have difficulty when their schools suffer from burglaries, vandalism and lack of funds for maintenance. The environment in which learners must learn is the same as the environment in which principals and teachers must work. We believe that everyone from learners to parents and principals wants to achieve a better education system.