Teach Bulawayo’s children in a language they understand

We, the undersigned parents, teachers, former pupils and members of the Bulawayo community, call on the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education to make sure that every teacher deployed to an ECD or infant class in Bulawayo can speak and teach in isiNdebele.

A young child cannot learn from a teacher they cannot understand. In the first years of school, children are learning to read, to count and to feel confident in a classroom, and they do this best in their mother tongue. When their teacher cannot speak isiNdebele, children fall behind before they have had a fair start. Parents are left paying for extra lessons, and the gap can follow a child all the way to Grade 7.

This is already government policy. The government has said that Early Childhood Development learners must be taught in their mother tongue, and that this is binding under the Heritage-based Education 5.0 framework. Zimbabwe’s Constitution recognises 16 languages, and a 2018 policy requires student teachers to learn three local languages beyond their own. The problem is not the policy. It is how teachers are deployed.

This petition is not about where a teacher comes from or what their surname is. Many teachers of every background speak isiNdebele well, and they are welcome in our schools. It is about one thing: whether the teacher in front of a five-year-old can speak that child’s language.

We ask the Ministry to:

1. Make spoken and written isiNdebele a requirement for every teacher deployed to ECD up to Grade 3 in Bulawayo.
2. Check language ability before deployment, not after complaints from parents.
3. Give priority for these posts to qualified teachers who already speak isiNdebele.
4. Offer teachers already in post who are not fluent either free isiNdebele training or a transfer to a school that matches their languages, without penalty.
5. Publish each year how many infant teachers in Bulawayo meet the language requirement.

Our children have a right to understand their teachers. We ask the Ministry to act before the next round of deployments.