Primary school teachers ‘disastrous’ in maths

A NUMBER of primary school teachers in the province cannot do Grade 8 mathematics.

This startling information was revealed by education deputy directorRay Tywakadi at a stakeholders meeting where he pointed out a number of challenges faced by Eastern Cape schools, especially black township schools.

Tywakadi said the outcome of a baseline assessment conducted last year to test the knowledge base of primary school teachers in maths and sciences, was disastrous.

“It’s really not a joke to say that primary school teachers will not perform well in Grade 8 mathematics. I do not want to give figures of the average pass, but it was disastrous.

“This brought us back to the drawing board to say we cannot succeed in maths and science unless our primary schools are spot-on.”

He said even though the province had a high number of matriculants doing maths and science, the challenge was in the low end results.

“We have close to 90 000 matriculants with 40 000 doing maths and science. That’s the third-highest matric maths and science enrolment in the country.”

The assessment results have prompted the department to extend its teacher development programmes from grades 10, 11 and 12 teachers to include primary school teachers.

According to the department, four provincial teacher development institutes and nine district teacher development centres have been approved and will be refurbished over the next three years to provide professional development opportunities to teachers close to their place of work.

Tywakadi said they had also partnered with universities to facilitate the training of teachers in these two subjects.

Some of the other challenges the DDG pointed out, were the leadership capabilities of principals, their deputies and heads of departments and a failure to meet the demand for maths and science teachers.

Tywakadi said universities did not have the capacity to produce the “big pool” of maths and science teachers needed and this was compounded by an exodus of teachers.

In the past six months alone, the department has lost 3 200 teachers.

To address this shortage, the DDG said they had three strategies: the Funza Lushaka state teacher bursary; offering teaching as second career option to people who majored in maths and science and the Mathew Goniwe scholarship programme, which gives a full bursary to pupils who do well in these two subjects. —