MEC Panyaza Lesufi led a team in Ivory Park with the police on Thursday to root out the mushrooming of makeshift schools in the area.
Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi inspected and closed two illegal schools in Ivory Park on 8 October 2020. Picture: Abigail Javier/EWN
IVORY PARK – The Gauteng Education Department is clamping down on illegal schools across the province.
MEC Panyaza Lesufi led a team in Ivory Park with the police on Thursday to root out the mushrooming of makeshift schools in the area.
The first school the MEC visited, English Private School, has been operating several branches in Tembisa since 2015, offering lessons in informal housing structures and backrooms.
From the outside, this school which teaches grades R to 10 pupils, looks like an ordinary house, but through the cast iron door are rooms that have been turned into inadequate learning facilities with close to 900 pupils attending the bogus school.
GALLERY: Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi shuts down illegal schools
The department also said Wisdom English Private School was unregistered.
Several educators didn’t have academic qualifications to teach and were undocumented foreign nationals.
Lesufi said the unregistered school could not issue pupils with credible qualifications and robbed hundreds of children of their right to education.
“There is somebody who is collecting funds from parents, who can’t account for those funds, that is the biggest problem. Money laundering and other related problems, we can’t allow that.”
The MEC has given officials 48 hours to intervene or it will face closure.
