The big ‘push’

IT IS a shocking indictment of our schooling system that more than 100 000 pupils who, on their own merits, should not be in class, will be writing matric this year.

It is easy to see why experts expect that this will have a serious impact on the final percentages of those who pass. Last year, only about a third of around 65 000 passed matric.

We should not just blame the Basic Education Department. The pressure on the department comes from the public. It is we who unfairly hold the state responsible for the reasons why not all of the children who started school 13 years earlier are in matric.

Societal problems such as early and unplanned parenthood, poverty and plain old choice, are some of the reasons that some children do not get to matric.

The Basic Education Department, as the custodian of schooling in the country, must, however, be seen to be acting speedily to resolve the problems that are within its remit, that cause pupils who are not ready to be thrown to the wolves. It serves nobody’s cause to pride ourselves on the numbers of pupils writing matric when we know that many of them will either not pass or will have marks that are only good enough to kick them out of the education system, without placing them in any better situation to further their studies.

Talk around strengthening the foundation phases must be seen to be implemented. Part of the reason pupils end up needing to be “pushed” is because they did not receive proper foundation.

By the time they get to high school, let alone matric, it is too late to fix problems that ought to have been caught much earlier in their school lives.

The department must also expedite the other much talked-about project of splitting the education system into three streams, providing for academically inclined, and for occupational and vocational training-inclined pupils.

We accept that little can be done for this generation of matrics, but we expect to see progress going forward.

By this we mean fewer children needing to be “pushed” to matric when clearly they are not ready.