'OBE a disaster from get-go'

Education specialist Graeme Bloch yesterday slammed the Outcomes-Based Education system he helped to build.

While Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga preferred to use phrases such as "phased out", the man widely referred to as the system's architect said it was dead.

Bloch said: "OBE is dead even if the minister did not want to admit it . It was just overly optimistic and too complex."

Bloch said only 8% of the 27000 government schools have libraries and 10% have Internet connections, yet the OBE syllabus required pupils to research a crippling number of assignments.

Given the lack of access to books, "how can you possibly implement an information-search approach like OBE?" Bloch asked.

"Most schools just couldn't do it and the education officials weren't prepared," he said.

"The bottom line is that OBE was never going to work in most South African schools."

OBE would haunt those who went through it for the rest of their lives, he said.

"There are lots of kids out on the streets without matrics. Those are the ones in trouble. Half of the OBE kids didn't make it to matric. They dropped out before matric, and then we had only a 60% pass rate."

Bloch said the effects of OBE were felt at universities, where pass rates were plummeting.

"Universities are saying they are not getting kids who are confident to study by themselves," he said.

However, simply scrapping OBE would not improve education overnight.

"Nowhere in the world have they improved education quickly," he said.

For one thing, pupils needed access to decent libraries.

"It's not going to take one announcement to fix these things, it's going to take a lot longer than we'd like."

Bloch welcomed the proposed Schooling 2025 system, but issued a warning: "The minister can announce until she's blue in the face in Pretoria, but the provinces have to deliver."

Teachers, he said, needed proper training.

"Saying that the system is doing away with paperwork is not going to mean that our maths teachers are suddenly brilliant. It will help teachers to focus but it is not enough."

Bloch has acknowledged responsibility for the role he and others played in drawing up OBE.

In an article he wrote for The Times last year, he said: "We were all guilty of over-optimism. We thought that educational change would be easy rather than the hard and complex challenge it is.

"OBE acknowledged the need to prepare the 21st-century child, technologically literate, open to rapid change, organised and able to plan, manage and implement innovative solutions in a world racked by war and global warming, economic meltdown and social despair.

"OBE created a shallow view of empowerment in which the student voice was substituted for the hard task of learning the basics. It reinforced a tendency to top-down edicts, saw poor training and development for teachers, and a host of form-filling and compliance rituals," he wrote.

Teacher's Story

MZUPHA Ntoni teaches Grade 11 and Grade 12 economics and Grade8 English at James Jolobe Secondary School in Motherwell, outside Port Elizabeth.

"I am not fully aware of the changes but if they can reduce the paperwork I will welcome it with open hands," he said.

The scrapping of OBE will be "much better for the teachers".

Ntoni said OBE had placed an enormous burden on him because he has more than 40 pupils in each of his classes.

"We had to go through each and every file, we struggled with that.

"The OBE standard required that each matric learner had to submit a file of two control tests, a project, an assignment, a mid-year exam and a trial exam."

Ntoni said that the most difficult aspect of OBE was research material for the many projects - four a year for each subject - that the pupils had to complete.

"We do not have enough books in our small library and we do not even have a computer at our school," he said.

Last year was particularly bad and he realised that because of the shortage of books and research material, his classes would not be able to complete an assignment for their portfolio.

"I gave the Grade 11s a project on land redistribution and I had to collect this information to help them." - Harriet McLea

A Pupil's Story

SINAZO Ngcete, 18, is desperate to pass matric for the second time - thanks to OBE.

Last year, the pupil from Nombulelo Secondary School in Joza, a township outside Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, failed matric. She was part of the class of 2009, the first group to have been taught according to OBE principles since she began school.

"I was very worried because I wanted to go to university this year. I wanted to study psychology and I thought I would pass, but I didn't," she said.

Ngcete said "lots of assignments" expected of her by the OBE syllabus piled on pressure.

Each of her seven subjects required the completion of four assignments that she had to "investigate", but she had no access to the Internet or to appropriate books.

"We couldn't find information at the school library," she said.

Her school library consisted of 10 book shelves, and there is no sign of a librarian. The school had no computers.

Now she is studying at a special school for pupils who want to improve their matric results and pass with better marks.

She has already improved on the 22% grade she got last year for maths, and 25% for physics. In June she passed all her exams and is "upgrading" her matric. - Harriet McLea