‘SEND KIDS BACK TO SCHOOL’
The government is ‘considering’ a request for children to return to school full time, rather than every second day. They need to do it quickly — or the sharp gap between private and public schools will only grow
bout 70% of SA’s children have missed the equivalent of a year of school education, with the department of education warning that at this point, catching up on all they missed will be impossible.
As it stands, many of the 9,6-million children in large classes at no-fee public schools attend school every alternate day to allow for social distancing and space between their desks. (At some wealthier fee-paying public schools, learners are back to a full five days per week programme.)
In contrast with the situation in the public
Asector, many of the 632,443 children at private schools have missed almost no learning days. This widens the gap between the elite minority obtaining a quality education and poorer children, many of whom end up wandering in the streets, unsupervised and hungry on days when they’re not at school.
Cora Bailey, who delivers food parcels and works with animals in townships near Soweto for Community Led Animal Welfare, describes a common sight.
“Children are running wild on the street,” she says. “They don’t have Zoom lessons. Most can barely afford electricity, [let alone] data for WhatsApp communication with teachers.”
She believes some have dropped out altogether, and will never return to school.
“There is not much adult supervision. The children are exposed to trauma and violence, and there is so much alcohol on the streets,” she says.
Every day of school missed actually equals two days, because of the compounding effects of children forgetting information and battling with the psychological impact of not being at school, says Stellenbosch economics professor Martin Gustafsson in a new research report.
Gustafsson’s research on the educational losses from the lockdown, published last July after schools were closed, suggests it would
take a decade to catch up on lost learning.
In a report he wrote for UN body Unesco in March, Gustafsson said that when schools reopened last year, school attendance was often 10% below normal, for various reasons, including parents’ worry that they’d pick up the virus. “While such fears may subside, permanent dropping out of school, linked to increased poverty, is likely to be one of the results of the pandemic,” he wrote.
The situation is now so serious that even the department of basic education is willing to admit that pupils may never catch up with their missed learning.
“Research shows that it is near impossible to recover,” says basic education department spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga in response to questions from the FM.
Reading — widely considered to be the foundation of most other learning — has suffered the most, says Mhlanga.
This week the education department said it is “considering” sending primary school pupils back to school full-time — but it must first get the go-ahead from the cabinet, which will first consult the ministerial advisory committee, and the national coronavirus command council.
Mhlanga says it is the teachers themselves who have asked the department to rethink the “rotation” plan, as it is “not effective, especially in primary school”.
Mhlanga says the department believes the risks of a full-time return to school can be managed through strict adherence to health and safety measures. Even the trade unions, he says, who have been the most reluctant to let their teachers return, say they “support the proposal on condition that strict [safety] measures are put in place”.
While the government has emphasised that social distancing remains a priority, Stellenbosch economics professor Nic Spaull last year called for children to attend school even in crowded classrooms where distancing is impossible. Spaull’s argument is that the risk to children of Covid is far less than the consequence of missed meals and an interrupted education.
As it is, children are far less susceptible to Covid than adults.
The most recent epidemiological report by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases shows that for every 100,000 children aged five to nine, about 410 will contract Covid.
By contrast, the risk of an adult between the ages 40 and 44 getting infected is tenfold higher, at 4,786.4 cases out of every 100,000.
As the age rises, the incidence grows: for children aged between 10 and 14, for example, about 713 per 100,000 will contract the virus.
But the real difference between adults and children is the death toll.
According to Stats SA, of the 54,000 official Covid deaths (which is acknowledged to be an undercount of the true number), only 0.1% are in children aged five to 14.
In all, 108 children may have died in that age bracket in SA. However, 1.5-million will go hungry every second day when they’re not at school, according to a report by deputy director-general of education, Mathanzima Mweli.
In July, after an application by non-profit organisations Section 27 and Equal Education, judge Sulet Potterill ordered schools to provide meals to children even on the days they do not attend school. For these children, she said, the school nutrition programme was “literally a lifesaving programme for the poorest of the poor”.
Yet it seems the government hasn’t properly complied with her order.
The monthly updates provided to the court by provincial education departments suggest that many children aren’t getting meals on all the days they don’t go to school.
Equal Education and Section 27 said the fact that children are still going hungry nine months after that court order is “an unbelievable and terrible neglect of responsibility”.
A return to full-time learning would, hopefully, address this gap.
Spaull asks what the criteria are for a fulltime resumption of learning and what the infection rate must drop to before classes go back every day.
“Where do we draw the line and say there’s a serious injustice being done to children in the sense that they’re not going to school? Yet noone’s talking about it,” he says.
While the trade unions have argued for a delay in full-time learning on the grounds that it exposes teachers to greater risk of dying from Covid, Spaull says the data regarding teacher mortality shows they don’t have a higher death toll than other adults. In other words, to suggest you’re protecting teachers at the expense of children’s education doesn’t accord with the evidence.
Nonetheless, if this is the government’s concern, it is mystifying that teachers haven’t been prioritised for vaccination, as 325,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine arrived in SA this week.
Children are running wild on the street. They don’t have Zoom lessons. Most can barely afford electricity, [let alone] data for WhatsApp communication with teachers
Cora Bailey
Spaull says the longer we postpone allowing all children to go back to school full-time, the higher the level of inequality will be.
This inequality was clearly evident in the speed at which private schools adopted technology.
When the hard lockdown was implemented in 2020, private schools Trinityhouse and Crawford College, owned by the JSE-listed AdvTech, took just three weeks to switch to online learning. This year, AdvTech says it expects “no severe disruption of learning”, as pupils can easily switch between face-to-face classes and online learning.
Most of SA’s children, however, aren’t in this boat.
Gustafsson writes in a research paper that “the World Bank has estimated that the 2020 disruptions to schooling will lead to large economic losses in the longer term”.
While the idea of reducing all risk of infection for children is understandable, the experts say the cost to their future has become too great.