EDITORIAL | The education department is failing our children and SA’s future

It does not require much thought to realise that if the first six years of a child’s life are the bedrock on which their development is built, the foundation phase of their education should follow the same trend.

Instead, the department of basic education pursues a different plan — push children in grades 1 to 3 to the next phase, even if they have not mastered basic numeracy and literacy skills.

And it is on this shoddy foundation that it hopes to build adults with the ability to debate, analyse, count, spell, read with comprehension and string together coherent sentences.

Obviously we have learnt nothing from the progressed matric pupils disaster, where those who failed in certain subjects were promoted to make-or-break matric.

Logic would have it that if somebody cannot master the basics, it makes no sense to advance them to a higher grade and, naturally, more complex learning.

Yet setting children up for failure is now trickling down to the foundation phase, which begs the question: why is the education department so dogged in getting a poor report card?

Yet setting kids up for failure is now trickling down to the foundation phase.

Basic education director-general Mathanzima Mweli told parliament last month that the education minister and provincial MECs agreed to implement “automatic progression” in the foundation phase.

He told MPs the problem was not the dropout rate, but high failure — as high as 30% in grade 1 — and repetition rates in different grades.

Then he justified the decision further with: “In many countries failure and repetition is not allowed any longer at any level of schooling.”

This decision follows closely on one where schools were instructed to award extra marks to pupils who fail some subjects in grades 4 to 9 in a bid to prevent a high number of them from repeating the same grade next year.

Anybody spot the worrying thread running through the decisions?

The children can’t make it on their own, so let’s keep subjecting them to bigger challenges without giving them every available tool to rise to them.

Teachers can now give pupils from grades 4 to 9 up to 5% more in a maximum of three subjects they failed if it will help them to meet the pass requirements.

This arrangement is part of the department’s “special condonation dispensation” for 2020.

It seems it is easier to keep carrying the problems into the next year until we have run out of options and our children drop out because they are frustrated with not being able to cope.

But as with any unresolved issue there is a snowball effect if left unattended. In this instance the country’s future will be threatened if we do not have a next generation strong enough to carry us forward.

That the extra marks should compensate for the disruption of the school year due to the Covid-19 pandemic is appreciated. In the end though, things will still not add up for the thousands of young people who will have to fight to claim a spot in this world.

According to a circular dated November 19, “mark adjustments and condonations are used as special dispensations to offset potential high retention of learners in an academic year”.

If a pupil meets all the other promotion requirements, but fails to achieve a 40% pass in maths, a compulsory subject, the pupil must be condoned in this subject.

Last week, basic education minister Angie Motshekga confirmed that about 300,000 pupils dropped out of primary schools in SA in a six-month period during lockdown.

If you think this number is staggering, consider the dropout figure a year or two from now when reality bites — not the department, but the children we have set up to fail.