There has been a delay of a few weeks in making the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) available for public comment. This is due to the fact that the NCS has to be considered by both the Committee of Education Ministers (CEM) and the cabinet before it can go into the public domain. These meetings will take place during the course of this month.
Keep checking the government website http://education.pwv.gov.za under Policies and Reports. A copy of the full set of documents will be sent to every school in the country. What will be made available are the following:
Draught learning area statements for each of the following eight learning areas – Languages, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Life Orientation, Technology, Economics and Management Sciences, Arts and Culture. (Note that the names of some of the learning areas have been simplified.) These learning area statements will include learning outcomes and assessment standards on a grade-by-grade basis from grade R to 9.
Where applicable, the learning area statements will stipulate what content and skills should be covered in each grade. They will also provide guidelines on the values to be handled and approaches to be followed in each learning area.
In doing so, the learning area statements will address a key weakness of C2005 in its present form, namely that there is not sufficient specification of the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that need to be covered in each grade.
The Languages learning area statement will be translated into all 11 official languages. The other learning area statements will be available only in English at this stage. Once final changes have been incorporated, the remaining seven learning areas will also be translated into all 11 official languages.
A draught implementation plan which will deal with possible timeframes for implementation of the National Curriculum Statement. It will make recommendations for strengthening capacity for curriculum implementation at national, provincial, district and school level. The implementation plan will address strategies for strengthening teacher development. It will also consider ways of improving the quality of learning support materials, as well as suggest mechanisms for ensuring timeous delivery of learning support materials to schools.
Changes will be made to these draft policy frameworks on the basis of public comment. Please ensure that your institution gets hold of these documents. Set up forums to encourage discussion and debate of each of the learning area statements by members of staff and send your feedback to the Department of Education. Once these documents have been finalised they will go through the process of becoming policy. This should happen by the end of 2001 or early 2002.
As a school principal or a teacher, how do you manage the interim? The bottom line is that outcomes-based education is here to stay. Teaching and assessing in an outcomes-based way involves having a clear idea of the learning outcomes you expect your learners to achieve. In addition, associated criteria for assessment or assessment standards need to be generated on a grade-by-grade basis against which you can assess the achievement of your learners in these outcomes.
The complication at the moment is that you are managing two different curricula – C2005 (grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8) and the Interim syllabus (grades 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12). And, in the short term, the availability of the National Curriculum Statement will present another set of challenges.
C2005 will continue to be implemented in its present form until it formally starts to be overtaken by the National Curriculum Statement in 2004. In the C2005 grades, it makes sense to focus mainly on the critical outcomes and the specific outcomes. The problem, however, remains that the specific outcomes are very broad and don’t provide enough indication of what is expected in each grade.
The National Curriculum Statement should provide helpful support in this regard. It should be possible to link the grade-by-grade assessment standards outlined in the NCS to the existing specific outcomes. (The assessment standards could be treated as a coherent set of performance indicators for each grade.) This will immediately provide a much clearer focus for teaching in every learning area in every grade. The one difficulty to be anticipated is that the existing C2005 textbooks on the whole will not be in line with the NCS.
Be aware that integration should not be over-emphasised at the expense of core skills and knowledge that every learner needs to acquire – particularly literacy and numeracy skills. Recognise that not all learning has to happen within the context of a programme organiser or theme. Rather you need to focus on developing your learners’ skills and understanding using appropriate textbooks and other resource materials available to you. Those still implementing the Interim Syllabus should begin to adopt an outcomes-based approach. Turn the Interim Syllabus into outcomes statements that include knowledge, skills, values and attitudes and begin to teach and assess in an outcomes-based way.
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, August 2001.