David Macfarlane
South Africa’s schools are heading for a crisis that could already be too late to avert completely. No new curriculum is yet in place for next year’s grade 10 learners; and it follows that no teacher training at this level has taken place, and no new textbooks and other support materials have been developed.
Teacher unions and other educationists express bewildered astonishment and frustration at the national Department of Education’s paralysis on the matter. “The system is failing the country,” says Pinky Mncube, national curriculum coordinator for the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union. Quite simply, “the national education department isn’t ready for grade 10s next year”.
The stakes are very high at this phase of education. Grade nine (the old standard seven) is the last year of compulsory schooling; and school-leavers will graduate with a General Education and Training Certificate (though implementation of this certificate has been deferred till 2004).
Grade 10 is the first year of Further Education and Training (FET), and leads in grade 12 to matric, performance in which is still widely perceived as an index of the success of the entire school system. While some learners pursue FET qualifications at technical colleges, the vast majority about 80% of FET learners are in schools.
The lack of a new curriculum for FET poses a particularly acute problem because learners proceeding to grade 10 next year will be the first to do so having been exposed to the new school curriculum, Curriculum 2005, in their grades seven, eight and nine. Curriculum 2005 involves a teaching and learning philosophy, outcomes-based education (OBE), that differs radically from conventional schooling, and new “learning areas” that replace the old “subjects”. Educationists are now asking what next year’s grade 10 learners and teachers are supposed to do.
So far only mathematics and languages have been formulated in OBE terms for grade 10s but not adequately, says Sue Muller, director of curriculum matters for the National Professional Teachers Organisation of South Africa.
If schools have to revert to the old syllabus, next year’s learners will face serious problems concerning subject choice, says Freda Wilkens, curriculum coordinator for the Suid-Afrikaanse Onderwysersunie. Learners will have to choose six subjects to take through to matric.
But Curriculum 2005’s learning areas do not directly prepare learners to take up many of the traditional subjects; conversely, some new learning areas such as arts and culture cannot be continued seamlessly beyond grade nine via the traditional subjects.
“How is the education department going to get learners to bridge the gaps between learners’ three years of OBE/Curriculum 2005 and the old grade 10 syllabus?” asks Wilkens. “The department just doesn’t have things in place. They’ve known since 1997 that this was coming what have they done?”
The lack of a curriculum has “major implications” for textbook publishers, says Kate McCullum of Oxford University Press. “Publishers are extremely anxious. We need a minimum of two years ideally three from the release of a curriculum to when the books are needed in schools. Clearly the process can’t work adequately in the nine months remaining.”
The Department of Education’s own timeframes state that an FET curriculum should have been formulated and approved by June last year, and that all schools should have received the new curriculum by August last year. But teachers remain in the dark about what they are supposed to be doing in their grade 10 classrooms next year, and are “confused and demotivated as a result”, Mncube says.
The education department’s Deputy Director General in charge of FET, Khetsi Lehoko, did not respond to the Mail & Guardian’s repeated requests for comment.