I was recently asked to talk to the staff of a primary school in Gauteng about curriculum change.
To begin with, I invited teachers to raise any questions or concerns they have with the curriculum. In this way, I was trying to ensure that I addressed issues that were relevant to them in the presentation I was about to give.
Almost all the concerns they expressed related to frustrations they were feeling with the administrative requirements that are being imposed on them by the provincial department and district officials.
Many of the requirements relate to assessment procedures, including the number of tests that need to be administered, how portfolios should be kept, and the unnecessary complexity of the recording and reporting system.
In addition to keeping a mark book and issuing reports, schools are expected to fill in a range of forms to report on learner progress. In cases where learners are experiencing problems, it can involve completing up to five different forms.
Most teachers complained that many of the prescribed procedures were unworkable and administratively cumbersome. They felt bogged down by processes which they did not believe added any value to the teaching, learning and assessment process.
They also felt that they were constantly being inspected. First, independent teams arrived to do whole school evaluations. No sooner had this process been completed when district officials arrived to do evaluations, often conveying conflicting messages.
I was struck by how disempowered teachers seem to feel. There appeared to be no room for negotiating with district officials about what does and doesn’t work. It was a one way, top-down communication that left many teachers feeling frustrated and demoralised.
Not for the first time did it occur to me that many of the head office and district officials who are formulating these ‘unworkable’ requirements have been out of the classroom since C2005 has begun to be implemented in schools. In other words, they themselves have little, if any, hands-on experience of implementing C2005 and outcomes-based education.
Since the inception of C2005, teachers have complained that the administrative requirements of assessing in an outcomes-based way are extremely demanding. Now that C2005 has been strengthened and streamlined, perhaps it is time for assessment procedures to follow suit.
It has been my understanding that all schools were supposed to appoint assessment teams in order to develop their own assessment plans (along the lines of their language plans). This assumes a level of decentralisation that is appropriate.
To think that inspections will improve teaching, learning and assessing is to miss the point. A culture of responsibility and commitment will develop if teachers are treated as professionals, receive high quality training and are given clear, useful and workable suggestions about what procedures for assessment and promotion should be followed.
Now that the Common Task for Assessment (CTA) is taking hold in Grade 9, teaching and learning in this grade are beginning to be geared towards the requirements of the CTA. There are persuasive arguments for the need for some form of benchmarking and certification as Grade 9 is the last year of compulsory schooling and an exit point.
However, introducing a CTA in Grade 7 is also being piloted in some districts in Gauteng. I think this may put undue pressure on learners and teachers to show results that are measured quite narrowly in terms of learner performance over a period of about six weeks instead of over the whole year.
My abiding sense is that a one-size-fits-all approach to assessment is never going to work. In fact, it may even be educationally unsound. There is so much diversity in our schooling system, and the way we assess our learners needs to reflect this diversity.
Taking into account just the linguistic and cultural diversity amongst learners, is it possible to set one CTA for all learners in the country without privileging or prejudicing certain learners over others?
Each school should be charged with the responsibility of giving learners a reasonable opportunity to achieve the standards set by the Revised National Curriculum Statement as it is rolled out. Where schools are clearly underperforming, special interventions from the province or the district may be required.
In general, however, over-regulation is dangerous, particularly when the regulations themselves don’t inspire confidence.