No new curriculum is yet in place for next year’s Grade 10 learners. Nor has there been any teacher training at this level, and no new textbooks and other support materials have been developed.
Teacher unions and other educationists express bewilderment and frustration at the national Department of Education’s (DoE) paralysis on the matter. ‘The system is failing the country,” says Pinky Mncube,
national curriculum coordinator for the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu). 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 9 is the last year of compulsory schooling; and school-leavers will graduate with a General Education and Training Certificate (although implementation of this certificate has been delayed until 2004).
Grade 10 is the first year of Further Education and Training (FET), and performance in matric 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 Curriculum 2005 for three years of their schooling. Educationists are now asking what next year’s Grade 10 learners and teachers are supposed to do – revert to the old syllabus and learning methods? And, if so, how – given learners’ exposure to outcomes-based education (OBE)?
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 (Naptosa). ‘They still have their origins in the old syllabus, and have not been fully conceptualised in terms of a whole new FET curriculum.”
And if schools do 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 (SAOU). 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. On the other hand, some new learning areas – such as arts and culture – cannot be continued seamlessly beyond Grade 9 via any of the traditional subjects.
‘How is the education department going 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 DoE’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 2001. 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 DoE’s Deputy Director General in charge of FET, Khetsi Lehoko, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
At the time of going to press, Sadtu was due to meet Lehoko in an attempt to get clarification about the DoE’s intentions. Last month Naptosa sent a lengthy document to Minister of Education Kader Asmal detailing numerous points on which departmental direction and clarity are still needed. And the SAOU believes ‘a clear message of urgency that these matters be addressed” must be sent to the department, Wilkens says.