The Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) and the Information Technology Association of South Africa (ITA) on Friday announced that they would roll out a R7-billion Schools of Specialisation programme over the next four years.

The programme would receive R5-billion in funding from the Gauteng government, while R2-billion would be raised through private-sector cooperation and investment, said Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi.

It would focus on developing mathematics, science, engineering, sports and arts, and commerce and entrepreneurship at schools.

The ITA and the GDE were expected to actively support the programme by providing technology and infrastructure to support the GDE’s digital classroom initiative, and by helping to develop content matter, assessments and teaching aides that would provide pupils with the foundational knowledge for these disciplines.

The programme also linked directly to the Gauteng City Region Development Plan’s five focus industries of financial services, information and communication technology (ICT), pharmaceutics, advanced manufacturing, and logistics and passenger transport, as well as the province’s five development corridors, each of which broadly focused on one of the five focus industries.

ITA president Sunil Geness noted that the model would enable companies to donate time, technology and expertise to the programme. The significant funding from the GDE and its four-year commitment to the programme enabled ITA member companies, as well as private-sector companies, to constructively engage with the programme to determine where they could add value.

“[On Friday morning], we heard from local cybersecurity firm Wolfpack marketing manager Tanya Sims that the company will donate its cybersecurity system for use in tablets at schools. Currently, there are some difficulties in ensuring that the pupils use the free data bundles, between 5 am and 9pm, to access only learning materials and approved sites.”

ITA members comprised more than 200 companies in South Africa, including large multinational firms, such as enterprise resources firm SAP, software firm Microsoft, technology company IBM and industrial firm Siemens.

GDE has provided a list of schools eligible for possible participation in the programme. Construction of the first school was currently under way in Emdeni, Soweto, where the former Fontanus Secondary School would be renamed to the Sicelo Dlamini Secondary School of Specialisation in April.

“The ICT industry’s participation is critical for the success of the initiative, and it welcomes the opportunity to collaborate towards the realisation of the [digital classroom] programme,” said Geness.

Lesufi noted that several institutions and companies were already providing digitised learning materials. “The national Department of Education also has a significant amount of digital and interactive learning materials, while the publishing industry has also come on board, as it believes that this represents its future business.

“However, one key problem is that there is not enough content in local African languages, but my team is working hard to come up with a solution,” he said.

One such a solution could be leveraging digital classrooms to record and broadcast the best teachers’ lessons to schools where there were no teachers for certain subjects, including in local languages, Lesufi suggested.

He conceded that there were some teething problems with the digital classrooms programme, but added that the department’s cooperation with the ICT industry should provide suitable solutions. Placing tracking devices in the interactive whiteboards had resulted in a decrease in theft and solutions were being discussed to close security gaps in connectivity and allow for the monitoring and tracking of devices, Lesufi concluded.