Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga has encouraged all crèches and play groups to participate in the Early Childhood Development (ECD) Census 2021.
She was speaking via a video recorded message during the launch of the census today.
The census is aimed at collecting data on all ECD programmes which will allow the department to have a better understanding of the sector’s landscape.
“We are going to be counting all the crèches and play groups and all the places where our most important citizens under the age of six stay during the day. We do need help because the more crèches that we count, the more we can plan and make sure that [children] continue learning through play,” Motshekga said.
The department’s Director for Learning and Teaching Support Material (LTSM): Policy, Development and Innovation, Kulula Manona, assured unregistered ECD centres that the census is not aimed at punishing them.
“This is not intended to be a punitive process. This process will actually benefit [the centres], particularly those that are not yet registered because they will get to be known, the challenges and gaps that they have which mitigate against them being registered. These will come to the fore and together we will plan and resolve how to support them. There is no intention for us to punish anybody,” Manona said.
Deputy Director of Research Coordination, Monitoring and Evaluation at the department, Dr Janeli Kotzé, said the intention was to build a data management information system for the sector.
“Once we’ve got this information…[t]hen we can do adequate human resource planning, we can see how we make sure that we provide support to these programmes. We can do better infrastructure planning by understanding what are the needs of the sector and how do we plan over the next five to 10 years for supporting them better.
“We can plan for the expansion of education to all programmes especially in those areas that are underserved, we can think through new [and] better ways to include children with disabilities and we can also help with support of implementing our national curriculum framework so that we can have integrated services and so that we can have quality education for all children,” she said.
Dr Kotzé added that the department is planning on visiting “an estimated 48 000” centres over the next 12 weeks but this will depend on how many of these centres exist.
Data collection has already begun and the census is expected to conclude in December this year. –
Source: South African Government News Agency