Bertha Centre’s Systems Justice Innovation (SJI) portfolio is participating in a systems wide collective impact process toward the improvement of education outcomes, and the collaborative response to systemic challenges to the quantity and quality of teacher education towards an improved education sector in RSA. Bertha Centre is a convening member alongside JET Education Services, Trialogue and Bridge.

Our role is to contribute and lead on process design towards sector-wide collaboration and innovation, along with implementing partners of the TICZA initiative.

Background

Teacher quality is a key determinant in improving educational outcomes and learners’ experiences. To respond to challenges in access, quantity and quality of initial teacher education, the Teacher Internship Collaboration South Africa (TICZA) is a multi-stakeholder effort that brings together government, academia, the private sector and implementers in order to drive innovation and continuous improvement in the delivery of teacher internship programmes through research, advocacy, collaboration and knowledge-sharing. TICZA collaborators include government departments, funders, higher education institutions, teacher internship programme implementers and other interested parties.

Overview

In 4-5 years TICZA aims to show, through research and demonstration success, scaled models of

alternative teacher education. Long-term outcomes include:

- To improve learner performance;

- To improve efficiency;

- To scale alternative pathways;

- To investigate and adopt other models for diversity.

TICZA is not exclusionary and is not prescriptive to the government. It aims for collaboration and to provide a systemic solution. It is primarily about public schools, though it has partners from private schools. It is an opt-in model with a transformative agenda that looks at shared accountability. TICZA is a new type of model, a CC-PPP - Citizen-Civil Society-Public-Private-Partnership.