Social issues play a big role in SA’S alarming dropout rate
While there is no denying that some learners drop out of school for no apparent reason, young people in our country face huge social challenges that make it difficult to obtain their matric certificate. By
Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga released the National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations results for the Class of 2023 on 19 January.
Every year immediately after the announcement, the “real pass rate” brigade come out to tell all and sundry that the results are not real. Instead of congratulating the young people on their achievements, the “real pass rate” brigade seek to draw attention to themselves by “calculating” a number which they want to make us believe is a “real” figure. In truth, the “real pass rate” is actually fake news which they will repeat until they are blue in the face.
Interestingly, they are always successful at convincing the media to give them space to elaborate on this rather bizarre idea that learners who did not sit for the examinations should also be counted in the results. The argument from the bogus analysis is that the learners who did not reach Grade 12 should also be added to the statistics which the minister unveils in her speech on the occasion of the NSC results announcement. If the number of NSC candidates who enrolled in 2023 is 717,377, the pass rate for the Class of 2023 is derived from that number.
It is often said that each year about one million children start school in Grade 1 and 12 or 13 years later the number of those who sit for the NSC examination is less than a million. There is no intention whatsoever on my part to downplay the dropout rate in our system, but let us ponder a few points. There are many reasons for some learners not ever reaching Grade 12 and some not getting there by the time we expect them to.
In February 2022 the South African Police Service released statistics that showed that 352 children were killed in the three months between October and December 2021, which is nearly four children killed each day. In the same report the police said that 394 children survived attempted murder and 2,048 children were victims of physical abuse. This means that each of these young people, most if not all of whom are of school-going age, must now recover from their physical injuries and cope with the mental trauma they suffered as a result of the violence.
According to the Road Traffic Management Corporation, in 2020 children made
up a staggering 34% of all fatalities caused by road accidents, up from 31% the previous year. In other words, 672 children in the age group of 0 to 9 years died while passengers in vehicles.
I remember so vividly when in September 2022 the news broke of 19 learners who died in Pongola, Kwazulu-natal, when a truck and bakkie collided on the N2. Earlier that year, in February 2022, another disaster had struck when eight learners also perished in a crash on their way from school in the Mpuluzi area in Mpumalanga. Who can forget the tragedy that occurred in June 2022 at Enyobeni tavern in the Eastern Cape, when 21 young people died?
In the latest statistic that we have become accustomed to, 28 deaths of initiates were reported in December last year. Annually, no less than 20 boys die in initiation schools in the country. Most, if not all, of these young men take a break from school to go to the mountains for the initiation.
We have an urgent task to save the lives of our children. It is sad and troubling that so many of our young people do not finish school after starting in Grade 1.
We also have a suicide crisis, with young people taking their own lives. In October 2023 the South African Depression and Anxiety Group reported that 9% of teenage deaths in the country are due to suicide.
There are other social challenges such as teenage pregnancies, with more than
100,000 adolescent girls giving birth in SA each year. The number of births to young girls aged 10 to 19 rose from 129,223 in 2019 to 139,361 in 2022. Sadly, the outrage about this crisis does not even last for a week. Early and unintended pregnancy affects the young women’s educational, health and social future.
While the Department of Basic Education has the policy on the prevention and management of learner pregnancy in schools, which aims to protect the right of the girls to access education, the reality is that some of them never return to school, while others go back much later and their schooling is disrupted and delayed.
And then there are young people who spend a part of their lives in rehabilitation centres because of drug and substance abuse. Some end up in prison because of crime, while others lead child-headed households and drop out of school to fend for themselves and their siblings.
There are learners in the schooling system who have been supported by means of social grants just so that they are not left behind. In the education department there are a myriad of measures designed to offer relief to impoverished families by providing meals through the school nutrition programme, learner transport and indeed the provision of learner material at no-fee schools, all designed to remove the barriers to access to education.
From an academic support perspective the department, led by the director-general for Basic Education, Mathanzima Mweli, presented a compelling report to Umalusi to demonstrate in real terms the support given to learners to ensure that no learner is left behind and that each one of the learners in the system is given an opportunity to finish with a good-quality matric pass.
Let us be honest: there are a group of young people who drop out of school and stay with their parents and guardians at home and do nothing. They simply refuse to go to school and there is no valid reason. The curriculum has been expanded with the addition of more subjects to ensure more choice for more learners in the system. Schools also do their best to support learners by means of weekend classes, and the success rate with this is showing in the throughput and pass rate. The education system is strengthening, and the Minister should provide more details on the work done in this regard.
Instead of the grandstanding by the “real pass rate” brigade, let us face the facts and deal honestly with the social matters. Point-scoring and finger-pointing merely shift attention from the real challenges we need to tackle.
There is no intention whatsoever on my part to downplay the dropout rate in our system, but let us ponder a few points. There are many reasons for some learners not ever
reaching Grade 12