Will latest education policy help SA’s youth?

BY KENNY PASENSIE

The government is changing its education policy again with the new Schooling 2025 strategy.  KENNY PASENSIE reviews the new policy and wonders whether it will improve South Africa’s dire state of education.

Another year, another plan to fix South Africa’s education system.

In 2010, basic education minister, Angie Motshekga, announced that a new long term strategy, Schooling 2025, will be ushered in to exorcise the last remaining ghosts of the much beleaguered OBE, which was introduced in 1998.

The new long-term strategy aims to improve the overall quality of education. It includes better teacher recruitment, learner enrolment, school funding and an improvement in the literacy and numeracy competency scores.

The driving force behind Schooling 2025 is the Department of Basic Education’s bold and ambitious plan called the “Action Plan to 2014: Towards the Realisation of Schooling 2025”.

So why would this particular plan work this time around, bearing in mind that the original OBE policy was reviewed and revised no less than three times since its inception? Will this new plan speak to the challenges highlighted by the Sowetan Grade 12 learner, Sibongile Nthiyane?

Sibongile delivered a damning indictment on the state of education in South Africa when she delivered a speech at the Sowetan Education Summit in March. Of the teachers she said: “They send us to buy alcohol during school hours, which they drink during school hours. These so-called parents of ours are the ones who tend to date us these days. How can you stand in front of me and teach when you know you are dating me?”

She also spoke about teenage pregnancies and drug abuse, about the lack of leadership from the department, about the ill discipline at the school, and about the politicising of the education challenges by political organisations like the Congress of South African Students (Cosas)

“How can they say they represent students,” she said of Cosas. “All we see them doing is disrupting schools and causing confusion and chaos…Cosas must leave us alone. We want education. We don’t want to be involved in politics which we don’t understand.”

It would be unfair, of course, to judge the turnaround strategy just yet. On paper the Action Plan appears to be on the right track. The Action Plan is linked to the delivery agreement which minister Motshekga and all nine MECs for education signed with the president.

The Delivery Agreement is based on four outputs: improving the quality of teaching and learning; undertaking regular assessments to track progress; improving early childhood development (ECD); and ensuring a credible, outcomes-focused planning and accountability system.

A key focus of the Action Plan is the realisation that in order to improve the system, we need to start at the early phases of a learner’s schooling.

Educationists are in agreement that Grade 3 and 6 literacy and numeracy scores are very good predictors of whether or not a child will go to university or not. South Africa has consistently fared badly in the Trend in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

TIMSS tests learners in different countries at the same stage of schooling every four years, and twice South Africa were last out of all African countries that participated. Current annual testing of Grade 3 and 6 literacy and numeracy competencies has echoed that of the TIMSS test with few learners making the pass grade in literacy and numeracy.

The Action Plan wants the numbers of learners who pass the annual test to increase to at least 60% by 2014. The 2009 baseline for Grade 3 was approximately 48% for literacy and 43% for numeracy. The Grade 6 learners fared worse, with approximately 37% for literacy and 19% for numeracy.

Since the announcement of the new strategy, the Department of Basic Education has already set in motion a number of curriculum changes that forms part of achieving the goals of the Action Plan. Since last year the administrative burden placed on teachers has been lifted—no more tedious portfolio files of learner assessments, less recording and reporting and fewer projects for learners to complete.

As of this year the language chosen by the learner, as a “Language of Learning and Teaching”, will also be taught as a subject, or at least as a first additional language, from Grade 1. Thus a learner has the option of learning in his or her mother tongue for the first three years of their schooling.

As from 2012 the number of subjects in Grades 4-6 will be reduced from eight to six. Technology will be combined with science, arts and culture will be combined with life orientation, and economic and management sciences will be taught only from Grade 7.

Other changes in store include introducing a comprehensive and concise Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) for each subject with details on what content educators ought to teach and assess on a grade-by-grade and subject-by-subject basis. Draft CAPS were published in 2010 for comment.

The Action Plan in places comes across as ambitious, but we sometimes need ambition to spur us on to greater things. To make the plan work, however, the Department of Basic Education must rely on its implementers: the teachers.

Hopefully the department’s prioritisation of teacher development, as is evident by the launching of the Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development, will ensure that not another Sibongile Nthiyane will stand up and speak about the same challenges five years later.

Let’s hope then that the education powers that be take heed of the words of the young Ms Nthiyane and make their plan work. Let’s hope that the turnaround strategy does not become another political sideshow, and that 12 years on we are introduced to yet another plan.

Kenny Pasensie is a researcher at the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office.