Teachers should write matric exams to

The scripts of grade 7 to 9 educators will be assessed to identify where they need support

It is recognised internationally that the key to sustained economic recovery and growth lies in high-quality school education, yet the majority of schools in South Africa are officially dysfunctional.

In “When less intervention in education practices produces much more” (January 24 2014) Geoff Schreiner raised criteria for proposed solutions to the abysmally poor performance of public schools.

Schreiner asked: “What can fea- sibly be done that will have the biggest possible impact in the shortest possible time and on the most costeffective basis?”

Other criteria emerging from his article are that any strategy should:

• Be driven by the department of basic education;

• Have a core focus on subject knowledge, knowledge of the curriculum and knowledge of how best to transfer facts, concepts and ideas; • Be driven by sound data;

• Assist educators to identify gaps in their subject knowledge;

• Have a support system to rectify identified shortcomings;

• Enable subject advisers to be more productively focused on areas of need;

• Focus on doing a few things well, rather than fail in too ambitious broad-spectrum strategies; and

• Lead to vacancies being filled with competent staff. (Note that the world’s top-performing school systems recruit their teachers from only the top school graduates from each year.)

The Bill of Rights states that “everyone has a right to basic education” (read grades R to 12) and the right to “further education” (read tertiary education). Access to the latter requires a suitably high standard of school education, which, in turn, cannot be attained without highly qualified and competent school educators. Given that one cannot teach what one does not know, it follows that inflicting poorly equipped educators on pupils is a gross and immoral denial of the schoolchildren’s constitutional right. This must be addressed urgently.

The Employment of Educators Act defines poor performance by an educator as “not performing in accordance with the job that the educator has been employed to do”. To address this issue “the employer [the department of basic education] must develop and initiate a formal programme of counselling and training” with “reasonable timeframes” within which the educator must meet the required standard.

The following educator-upliftment proposal focuses on rapidly improving the subject knowledge of grade 7 to 12 educators by “piggy backing” on the existing, largely efficient and impartial nation-wide grade 12 final matric exam infrastructure.

As the employer, the department of basic education must inform all grade 7 to 12 educators and subject advisers, one year in advance, that:

O They will be obliged to write the relevant matric exams in their primary/main teaching subject every year for three years or until they achieve an 80% pass rate in that subject. Grade 7 to 9 teachers will write the exam of the subject most closely related to their main subject. For example, general science teachers can choose to write either