Hearings into school curriculums

2009-06-30 22:03

Cape Town - Public hearings will be held into South Africa's school curriculums in coming months as it remains the subject of endless complaint, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said on Tuesday.

"We will be doing both investigations and holding public hearings on this matter in the next four months, to make sure that we identify areas of further work and interventions and address them once and for all within the coming months and years," she told MPs in her department's budget vote.

Motshekga said a report commissioned by her predecessor, Naledi Pandor, found that the primary school curriculum was widely seen to be problematic and blamed for the fact that pupils can neither read nor write when they get to high school.

Similarly, she said, universities complain that matriculants cannot cope with the rigour of tertiary education.

Outcomes based education

Quoting from the report, she said: "There remains, in some provinces, very articulate expressions by school managers and teachers about the failure in curriculum implementation to address the basic competences of literacy and numeracy in schools."

South Africa controversially phased in outcomes-based education after the fall of apartheid and 2008 saw the first batch of matrics to have completed school under the new system write their final exam.

Just more than 62% passed, entrenching criticism of the system. Only 18% obtained a matric exemption.

Motshekga said the complaints included that the curriculum was expensive, created more paperwork, was open to a range of different interpretations and that teachers were not adequately prepared on how to implement it.

Culture of resistance

She said the other major challenge facing education was "weak and uneven" accountability in the school system.

"The accountability system is weak because of a pervasive culture of resistance to strong measures of accountability.

"We are well aware of incidents whereby our schools lose valuable teaching time because of absentee teachers, incompetent principals and under-prepared district officials.

"The culture of teaching and learning has, for all intents and purposes, disappeared in most rural and township schools."
 

- SAPA