In July, Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi said about 30% of registered matriculants had not returned to school after the hard lockdown. “We can’t account for almost 30% of Grade 12 learners who are not attending school in Gauteng,” he said, adding that large percentages of grades 6, 7 and 11 had also not returned to school.
Fast-forward to September and the situation does not seem to have improved much. The basic education department told parliament it estimated about 23,000 matriculants had dropped out, according to an SABC report.
As matrics sat down for their crucial year-end exams this week, research appeared in the in PLOS One revealing alarming rates of alcohol abuse among school dropouts. Boredom during free time and being with friends contributed to alcohol and tobacco use. Out of the 41 youngsters surveyed, 72% smoked and 56% drank alcohol.
An article about SA’s school system published on The Conversation website points out that SA has no national qualification below Grade 12 that can serve as a fallback for those not reaching matric. This, it says, is unusual for middle-income countries. If you’ve dropped out of school in SA, there are very few good prospects out there.
In a series of articles run on Sunday Times Daily about schools in gangster-ridden areas in Cape Town, our reporter Aron Hyman, in the last instalment, examined the successes of Kasselsvlei Comprehensive High School in Bellville. Despite many of its pupils growing up in a gangster culture, it has largely managed to keep that culture out of the school. It has become a safe haven for children.
But once they finish matric, where to from there?
In Hanover Park, there are two organisations, Ceasefire and Yiss, focusing on taking in matrics, up-skilling them and creating job opportunities for them.
“There are more than 200 matriculants from the three high schools around us who will soon have nothing to do. These are kids who came through guns and bullets for 12 years. They are sitting in no-man’s land. There are no opportunities for them. We will take as many of them as possible. We teach them hairdressing, beauty and how to become barbers. The other skill set is hospitality, barista training, chef courses and baking,” said Roberto Stemmet, who runs Yiss.
Western Cape education MEC Debbie Schäfer told Sunday Times Daily her department was well aware of the problems but budget cuts were a huge hurdle. She criticised the combined R16.5bn the government recently allocated to SA Airways to settle its debts and for its business rescue plan. For Schäfer, this an absurd decision.
“People think we don’t understand what the [education] issues are. We do, we understand very well. We simply can’t do what we need to do because every year the budget is effectively reduced and now it’s going to be even more so.”
Part of the solution is to expand on technical schools. “We have a number of technical schools already. We are focusing now not only on STEM [science, technology, education, maths] but we’ve expanded that to science, technology, engineering, agriculture, mathematics, art, coding and computational skills,” she said.
SA needs leaders to fund and clone initiatives such as those by Ceasefire and Yiss, who are empowering otherwise jobless youth. We need to build on the plan to expand vocational education. It will help ease the unemployment burden among our young people and create hope for school dropouts.
Keeping our children close to our hearts and away from boredom and the bottle should be our first priority.
