October school holidays to go ahead
THE October school holidays will not be scrapped, despite the loss of more than half of the learning time last year, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said.
Motshekga held a media briefing yesterday to spell out the department’s response to the impact of Covid-19 on schooling.
Motshekga said social distancing requirements remained a challenge in some schools with the full-time return of primary school learners.
“No one can deny the resurgence of Covid-19 cases in isolated parts of the country, which affect our schools. For instance, the Phoenix area in the Umlazi District in KwaZulu-Natal and the Motheo District in the Free State are cause for concern. The Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal continue to record high community infections, resulting in the temporary closures of schools,” Motshekga said.
She said, apart from this, the system has remained stable and functional, despite persistent learning losses attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The minister reiterated that the Department of Basic Education was extremely concerned about the loss of learning since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic last year.
“Research indicates that lost school days lead to foregone learning losses. International experience confirms learning losses experienced during pandemics, lead to long-term adverse effects, including learners obtaining lower overall educational value, and ultimately lower lifetime earnings,” she said.
Motshekga said the department has begun to measure Covid-19-related learning losses by comparing how much children learned last year with how much they learned in an average school year before that.
Stellenbosch University’s Professor Martin Gustafsson, whose research interests include economics of education, said about 80% of a year’s worth of learning was lost last year, amounting to 54% of contact time of the school year.
“With the disruptions, learning does not happen as it did before. There is also forgetting that happens, and these disruptions have effects on learners that go beyond what one might think, just looking at the time learners have lost,” he said.
Gustafsson said that about half of the school year has been lost so far this year.
“If children are not in contact with teachers, especially children from disadvantaged communities, learning does not happen as it should,” he said.
Gustafsson said the sobering reality was that the sector has reached a point where it was virtually impossible to recover all of the lost learning. “We are almost certainly not going to be able to get back to where we would have been had there not been a pandemic.”
Motshekga said the first step towards addressing the crisis of lost learning was to prevent further disruptions to school time and prevent other learning losses. The second step was to introduce measures to catch up the lost time, as well as the teaching and learning, that has been lost during the pandemic.
Motshekga confirmed that following a meeting with the Council of Education Ministers on Friday, the October school holidays will not be scrapped. This comes following rounds of consultations regarding the amended school calendar for the 2021 academic year.