The role of law and policy in the professional security of grade R educators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
iii Abstract In South Africa, the expansion of early childhood development was projected in White Paper 5 and Grade R was determined as the reception year. One condition for the achievement of objectives in Grade R is quality education, in which the teacher plays an irreplaceable role. How effective the Grade R teacher is in the performance of her work, however, depends amongst others on how she experiences her work-life and the extent of her security as a professional in the workplace. The paucity in research on the labour law position of the Grade R educator is due to the relative low status of employees in the early childhood development sector. Professional security was approached from a labour law perspective to start filling the knowledge gap in Education Law on the labour law position of the Grade R teacher with this modest contribution. The execution of policy forms an integral part of the Grade R teacher's employment conditions and determines to a great extent her daily task. This research answers the central research question: which roles do law and policy play regarding the professional security of the grade R educator? The research approach was qualitative-interpretivistic in nature and included observation of Grade R teachers' workplaces, as well as semi-structured interviews. A group of Grade R educators in the Matlosana and Tlokwe areas in the North West Province as well as principals and heads of department in the Foundation Phase were also interviewed. Other stakeholders such as parents as members of school governing bodies, members of teachers' unions and university lecturers were also participants in the research. Data generation on a smaller scale took place in Ontario, Canada, where the respective roles of law and policy regarding the Full-Day Early Learning Kindergarten programmes in professional security was investigated. All the data was used to understand and describe professional security of Grade R educators better, and generalisation was not the goal. The conclusion was reached that the theoretical underpinnings of the five legal disciplines that were used in creating a legal framework for professional security, were particularly relevant for the work-life of the Grade R participants in the study. Two psychologically oriented theories have also contributed to a deeper understanding of professional security.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".