One of the interesting sides to working as an education journalist is that there is hardly anything that is not of relevance to my beat. From a hoola-hooping contest to national budgets or the onset of war in distant lands, everything has either relevance to, or influence on, the processes of learning and teaching.
The point that learning and its institutions do not exist in a vacuum, but are shaped by the world in which they operate, is not a new one. But it is still a point worth repeating — for ultimately, it is not only learning and teaching issues that determine the health or otherwise of the education system. It is also the world around them.
The report on the evaluation of the Foundation Phase, released last month, provides some profound insights into exactly this. The evaluation took into account the broader context of education, involving the learners, educators, parents and district officials in its research. It aimed to measure the influence of a number of indicators, both school-specific practises and conditions and aspects such as the availability of resources in the child’s home.
One finding that got a lot of attention was the average scores achieved by Grade 3 learners:
– Life skills — 54%
– Literacy — 54%, with 68% in Listening Comprehension and 39% in Reading Comprehension and Writing; and
– Numeracy — 30%
As Minister of Education Kader Asmal concedes, these findings confirm the somewhat bewildering fact that Foundation Phase teachers ceased to teach their wards these basic literacies because Curriculum 2005 did not explicitly mention the need to.
This is a problem that belongs to the education system itself and it’s going to need some thoughtful intervention to address.
But other noteworthy findings refer to conditions outside the school gates. One striking factor uncovered in the research is that the national average level of education of parents lies between grades 9 and 10. The significance of this for the new generation of school-goers is that ‘educated parents are more likely to provide support to the learner at homeâ€.
Another indicator of the lack of educational support on the home front was similarly reflected in the fact that only about 31% have access to resources such as reading materials.
What this points to is the tremendous responsibility that then falls to educators — many of whom are short on formal education themselves. They are charged with helping their learners to achieve schooling excellence with almost no support from the child’s own network.
But an acknowledgement of the massive influence of the external world on the classroom by no means lets the Department of Education (DoE) off the hook. In fact, it does the opposite; for if there are so many factors that are beyond the DoE’s control, then the pressure really is on for it to take full responsibility where it can.
The failures of the DoE highlighted in the Foundation Phase report — such as the provision of classrooms, textbooks and effective teacher training — become all the more unacceptable in light of the burning social and economic issues beyond the school gates.