Education in the doldrums

A new school curriculum aiming to overhaul the legacy of inferior apartheid schooling and bring South Africa's education system more in line with the demands of a global economy has stumbled at the first hurdle. The vocational Further Education and Training (FET) curriculum, designed to prepare learners for the demands of the workplace, is gradually being phased into the country's 27,000 public schools, with 16-year-old pupils in the Western Cape Province as its test subjects. Although the programme has only been running since January, mid-year exam results released late last month saw some schools posting a 60 percent failure rate, according to local media reports. Principals said the usual curriculum followed by pupils up to Grade 9 had not prepared them for the new one, which includes mathematics and mathematical literacy as compulsory subjects. Sue Muller, a director of the 84,000-strong National Professional Teachers Organisation of South Africa, said the organisation was not surprised by the results, because teachers had not been sufficiently trained to implement the new curriculum. "There is a bit of time to pick up the pieces, but after nine years of schooling, learners are unable to read and write," she said. "Can you fix that in three years [when learners will graduate]?" The Western Cape's education spokesperson, Gert Witbooi, declined to confirm the reports of the poor pass rate, and said the department was in the process of compiling its own figures. "We are analysing the results, so I can't say much about it." He said the Western Cape results would be on the agenda of a high-level meeting with Minister of Education Naledi Pandor next week. Since apartheid's demise in 1994, the government has sought to reverse the ravages of the 'Bantu education system', which used schooling to entrench white superiority, by instituting an outcomes-based system that has also gone through a number of curriculum changes. The vocational curriculum was devised to help equip South Africa with the homegrown skills required to expand the economy. After 12 years of democracy, education remains in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. In a survey of 14 southern African countries by the Southern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality, published last year, South Africa was only kept from last place by Namibia and Malawi. Linda Chisholm, research director of Child, Youth, Family and Social Development at the Human Sciences Research Council, said the education department "tells us that the reason for this is that South Africa has mass enrolment on far higher levels [than other countries surveyed]. This might go some of the way to explaining the problem, but not all the way." She said South Africa and Namibia were among the worst performers in the survey, but among the richest countries in the region. There were also systemic issues that contributed to education's malaise, from teacher training to South Africa toppling Brazil as the country with the greatest disparity in wealth between rich and poor. "In education, context matters," Chisolm said. "Teachers cannot be held solely responsible, you cannot just isolate one factor." The Western Cape, South Africa's second richest province, released a report last month on the numeracy and literacy levels of 11-year-old pupils: 17.2 percent of those tested for numeracy attained the average score of 29 percent, while the figure for literacy was 42.1 percent. Tony Leon, leader of the official opposition Democratic Alliance party, said in a recent internet column that "over 25 percent of schools do not have water facilities, some 15 percent of schools do not have sanitation and 75 percent do not have libraries. As of February 2005, the total estimated shortage of classrooms nationally stood at 31,254". Low teacher morale, HIV/AIDS, retirement and the search for greener pastures has led to 20,000 teachers leaving the profession each year, said Salim Vally, a senior researcher at the University of the Witswatersrand's Education Policy Unit, but only 5,000 teachers were entering the profession annually. "Politicians condemn teachers at every turn," he commented, "but they are not providing support for them [teachers], or the resources for the schools." Since the advent of democracy "there has been sufficient time to turn around the situation, but the situation is not being turned around."