/ 30 December 2008

Teachers’ unions concerned at matric results

The drop in the matric pass rate from 65% last year to 62,5% is cause for concern, says the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (Sadtu).

The drop in the matric pass rate from 65% last year to 62,5% is cause for concern, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union said on Tuesday.

The South African Teachers’ Union (SAOU) expressed ”dismay” at the decrease and the Professional Educators’ Union (PEU) expressed ”some measure of disappointment”.

”We believe that to maintain the momentum for increased access, we have to understand and address the factors which lead to drop out and failure,” Sadtu president Thobile Ntola said in a statement.

”Our sense is that issues of historical disadvantage and poverty associated with race, class and the rural-urban divide, and uneven support and poor management, especially in some districts and provinces, are crucial here, and we would expect the Department of Education to deepen its analysis in this respect,” he said.

In a separate statement, SAOU president Steve Roux questioned the marking process and the competence of the markers.

”The veil of secrecy which has been drawn over the marking and related processes by the education authorities, can easily lead to suspicion and uncertainty about the degree to which the final marks reflect the real performance of the learners,” he said.

SAOU nonetheless cautioned against over-reacting to the ”less than satisfactory” results, and said problem areas needed to be identified and the root causes addressed, rather than just the symptoms.

”We note that the 2008 examination was the first of its kind, and that it may be misleading to compare it with the previous examinations,” said PEU president Jake Dikobo.

What was needed was an analysis of the results and their processing to ”determine whether the uncertainties and challenges that accompany an examination based on a new curriculum have been satisfactorily dealt with,” said Roux.

All three unions voiced concern at the incomplete marks of more than 50 000 candidates whose schools failed to provide provinces with their continuous assessment and oral marks.

”It is unfortunate that this could not be detected earlier,” said Dikobo.

The unions and the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa) were also worried about the 200 000 pupils who failed.

”We hope that there will be a programme to assist them complete their Grade 12. The learners will need all the help they can get,” said Dikobo.

They faced a ”bleak future”, noted Roux.

”The vexing question is: ‘Where will they be accommodated next year?’ In [further education and training colleges?” Naptosa president Nkwai Ramasehla asked in a statement.

That was not likely given the state of ”chaos” in many of these colleges. ”Further, what support will there be for these unsuccessful candidates?” he asked.

Sadtu demanded that adequate resources be made available to them for the rewriting of exams.

The unions were encouraged at the number of candidates this year and that a higher percentage of them qualified for tertiary education than last year. They congratulated the successful candidates, their families, teachers and examiners.

”Higher education institutions need to gear up to accept these increased numbers,” said Ntola, adding that those from poor communities would need help accessing tertiary institutions.

There was praise across the board for the outcomes-based education (OBE) curriculum.

It was ”a necessary break with apartheid education”, said Sadtu, adding that it made education more relevant to the needs of society.

”The union opposes any attempt to destabilise the education system by scrapping the current national curriculum,” Ntola warned.

”PEU accepts that there are serious challenges with OBE, but rejects calls for its scrapping,” said Dikobo.

This would mean introducing another system, which would demand time and resources for training, and would bring with it instability and uncertainty.

”We still have to hear what alternative the ‘critics’ are putting on the table, because for us going back to Bantu education is out of the question.”

He said the 2008 results fit into the pattern of a ”downward slide” over the past six years and said all involved in education had to identify what they had been doing wrong.

Naptosa agreed that while there had been some gains under OBE, a lot of serious analysis and logical, systematic and coherent planning was needed if the quality of education was to improve.

Roux, meanwhile, suggested that the structure of the curriculum required urgent attention, including prescriptions on subject combinations.

A major area of concern highlighted by the unions was the uneven results across the provinces.

The ”dismal” results of pupils in large rural provinces — Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and the Eastern Cape — showed that they were still at a disadvantage, they said.

The unions suggested this was mainly because of an uneven spread of resources, and the resulting large classes, poor support from district officials and inadequately trained teachers in poorer areas.

These were ”undoubtedly some of the contributory factors to these poor results,” said Ramasehla.

”These matters will have to receive high priority and urgent attention,” said Roux.

Naptosa voiced concern about the standard of the papers, suggesting they were less demanding than in the past and that they, in future, be benchmarked against those in other countries.

Also in need of attention, Sadtu said, was the development and support of teachers, the promotion of home language instruction in previously disadvantaged schools and improving the quality of education. – Sapa