Thank you very much for your detailed reply, hon President. I think it is very apt that the first time you respond to questions in this House as President it is about education.
Much has been said about our schooling system, particularly in the last few weeks. People have used the word "failure". This country has some outstanding schools and some dismal schools; it has outstanding teachers who are very committed and those who are underperforming. We have serious backlogs in terms of infrastructure in our rural schools and in some of our township schools - there is overcrowding - and some provinces suffer from bureaucratic problems.
These are all issues that the principals raised with you in the imbizo a few Fridays ago. Do you therefore agree that our collective challenge is to rectify these fundamental inequalities, and that it is unhelpful to assert - as some do - that our schooling system is a failure, particularly because every year we churn out numbers of students who are very successful despite the dysfunctionalities in some of our schools?