Launch of the Western Cape Education Department's Textbook Retrieval Campaign

The Western Cape government is fully committed to the provision of textbooks to all our learners, as we believe they are an indispensable learning tool. That is why we lead the country in textbook provision and have put enormous financial and other resources into ensuring our schools are text rich environments.

We want to provide access to texts in every possible way and to ensure that classrooms are text-rich, by supplying them with books, posters and other teaching and learning materials (LTSM).

Therefore, as part of the Western Cape Education Department's strategy to ensure text-rich schools, the Department has launched a campaign to encourage learners of all grades to hand in their textbooks at the end of each school year.

Many schools already have textbook retrieval programmes and the department has provided guidelines and training on how to do this in the past.

However, some schools are not as successful as they should be in retrieving textbooks from learners at the end of the school year. The aim of this campaign is to ensure that all schools have the necessary awareness and systems in place to ensure that their textbooks for the next school year.

Every cent replacing a textbook that should have been retained in the system is money that could be spent on ensuring that our schools are textbook rich through the provision of additional textbooks.

More concerning, if a school does not manage their textbook retention in an orderly and pro-active fashion (as they are required to do with all assets), and textbooks are not retained, the education of those learners that follow the next year, will be compromised.

The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) does all it can to ensure that this kind of situation is avoided. For example, this year, the WCED has gone beyond the national norm for textbook allocation, by initiating additional textbook top-ups. We have this year provided an additional fifteen thousand (15 000) textbooks to Grade twelve (12) learners in the seven core subjects in a top-up programme. In total, we have allocated an additional one hundred and one million rand (R101m) for the purchase of text books throughout the system.

We sincerely hope that this campaign will then encourage learners to return their textbooks at the end of the school year. It will not only help the WCED to extend the range of texts we can buy with the available funds, but will ensure that each learner has a textbook in their hand at the start of the school year.

Therefore I appeal to the class of 2010 to contribute to the success of the class of 2011 by returning their textbooks to their schools before they embark on the next exciting phase of their lives.