A shocking 570,000 children and teenagers were not attending educational institutions in 2016, including more than 45,400 who found education “useless or not interesting”.
About 104,000 were from the compulsory schooling age group of seven to 15 years while the remaining 466,000 were 16 to 18 years old.
These figures are contained in a report titled General Household Survey: Focus on Schooling 2016, which was released by the Department of Basic Education last month.
It has a close working relationship with Statistics South Africa which conducts the survey in about 22,000 households.
The department uses the responses of the survey to assess its progress on access to schooling as well as “the quality, efficiency and equity in educational programmes”.
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