School enrolment rates are not the issue when it comes to the education woes of South Africa. In fact, government has succeeded in providing near-universal primary school education. It’s what happens in school that’s the problem. And sadly, looking at how short our basic literacy and numeracy rates fall compared to the rest of southern and eastern Africa, we are performing poorly.
Post-apartheid, the quality of education offered in ‘poor’ schools is still sub-standard. Far from the country’s political transition offering opportunities to the historically disadvantaged, this low quality tuition is serving to entrench their exclusion and marginalisation. It’s really that simple: without an adequate basic education, our children have little chance of decent employment in a country with already few job opportunities and extremely high youth unemployment rates. And without access to better job opportunities and higher wages, they cannot break the cycle of poverty and inequality.
Poverty/education link
This inextricable link between education and the labour market was one of the key focus areas of a study by the University of Stellenbosch’s Department of Economics entitled Low quality education as a poverty trap. The study sought to gain a better understanding of the complex and self-perpetuating relationship between low education quality and poverty. Researchers also investigated why the quality of education offered to poor children is so below par, and whether poverty itself is perpetuating poor performance or if the way schools operate in poor communities is to blame.
“Research suggests that employment and earnings are strongly dependant on having about 12 years of schooling. But approximately 60% of our youth do not complete secondary school and are entering the labour market without a qualification; that piece of paper that tells potential employers what abilities they have,” explains Martin Gustafsson, a researcher involved in the study. Grade attainment in South Africa is more or less on a par with what is found in other similar developing countries, but as crucial as grade attainment is, the performance — or underperformance — of schools from which that education is attained is just as important. Underperforming schools, categorised as having a grade 12 pass rate of less than 60%, are a huge sticking factor in South Africa’s development.
“The respondents in our research — educators, principals, school management teams and school governing bodies — repeatedly stressed the view that primary schools are failing to lay a solid educational foundation, especially with regard to numeracy and literacy,” point out Amiena Bayat and Wynand Louw from the University of the Western Cape’s Economics Department and the Institute for Social Development in their study investigating the causes of underperformance at secondary schools in the Western Cape. “A striking characteristic revealed by our research was the high level of grade repetition at underperforming schools.”
Government policy
According to their study, one of the main reasons for this chronic underperformance is the current government policy which states that a child may only be ‘held back’ once per educational phase. “This imperative forces schools to promote learners to the next grade without them having mastered the necessary subject knowledge and educational competencies as demanded by the curriculum,” they explain.
“Many parents simply think that because children are passing, they are doing well enough at schools,” concurs Servaas van der Berg from the University of Stellenbosch’s Department of Economics who headed the Low quality education as a poverty trap study, explaining why so many parents are shocked when their children then do not pass matric. The consequence of promoting children to a level beyond their competency can be extremely damaging.
“Learners feel lost and disengaged and their behaviour becomes disruptive. Teachers, in turn, feel demoralised and experience a sense of failure when large numbers of their learners continuously fail,” say Bayat and Louw. “Our findings suggest that the high dropout rate in grade 10 at under-performing schools is, to a significant extent, a consequence of this policy.”
Why poor performance?
Why are schools in poor communities not performing well? “Some point to poverty and lack of resources as the reason, but is this really the case?” asks Van der Berg. He points out that other African countries that are even poorer and have fewer resources than South Africa have actually performed much better in Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) surveys.
In fact, of the 15 countries assessed in tests evaluating the reading proficiency of the poorest 25% of children in each country, South Africa came 14th, making it the second worst, beating only Zambia. Maths scores were also abysmal, with South Africa coming in 12th. “These results answer the question as to what extent poverty is the constraining effect in South Africa,” reiterates Gustafsson. “Clearly there is a lot one can do despite poverty and it does not necessarily place a ceiling on what we can achieve in schools that cater for poor learners.”
According to Van der Berg, curriculum coverage and frequency of mathematics and literacy exercises are extremely low and strongly associated with poor performance. Other causes are that “the difficulty level of what is covered in class (some of which is rooted in weak teacher subject knowledge) is simply too low, the pace too slow, there are too many interruptions — and most principals are not really interested enough about how much teaching and learning is really happening in classrooms,” he says.
“That is why the Annual National Assessments (ANAs) that were introduced this year are potentially so important. These are tests written by all children in a grade across the country, and then marked by the teachers in the school. “These tests provide teachers with a better idea of the level of difficulty of the assessments they should set their classes, they indicate to them what work they should have covered, and they could also provide a valuable comparison of how well their classes are performing relative to others in similar schools, or against the country average.”
The ANAs are one way to address the problem of underperforming schools. However, Bayat and Louw feel that schools should also be allowed to fail learners who do not achieve the required standard in examinations, acknowledging that addressing the issue of forced promotion is but one aspect of improving the education system. “Learners in under-performing schools are facing a double challenge: they are not adequately prepared for the demands of a secondary school curriculum and class sizes makes individual tuition and regular support from teachers impossible.”
Compulsory assessment
They suggest some type of compulsory national grade 7 assessment to make sure that those leaving primary school are competent to enter grade 8 at secondary school as one way of addressing this. Reducing the teacher-to-learner ratio by providing more classrooms to address overcrowding and increasing the number of teachers are other possible solutions.
“Whilst the consequences of forced promotion are central to our findings on underperforming schools, there are various other issues that also impact critically on the school environment. “The lack of management capacity and leadership of specifically school principals, school management teams and school governing bodies is one such area. The devastating effect of teacher knowledge and absenteeism is another. However, possibly the most important additional issue to resolve is the official language policy practiced at South African schools. English and Afrikaans as mediums of instruction profoundly debilitate both the learning and teaching process at under-performing secondary schools in the Western Cape that cater for predominantly Xhosa-speaking learners.”
Parents can also play a crucial role in taking a stand against inferior education, but many do not know what they should be expecting of their schools, explains Van der Berg. “Only when parents have a better understanding of the quality of the education that their children receive, will there be appropriate indignation or anger at schools that are failing them. “We need this information to empower our communities. As a nation, we cannot continue with a situation where only one tenth of our schools really provide acceptable quality education. “Our children deserve better.”
This article originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian newspaper as a sponsored feature