More pupils drop out due to Covid

WITHDRAWN: DEPARTMENT FLAGS 20 000 CHILDREN

Almost 4 000 scholars unaccounted for in Gauteng.

Covid-19 could have caused South Africa’s biggest school dropout rate yet. The department of basic education projects historically high dropout rates based on the number of matric pupils who were not accounted for by the final exam last year.

This was revealed in a presentation shown to parliament last week on the department’s readiness to reopen schools next month.

More than 20 000 matric pupils from Gauteng, the Western Cape, Limpopo and KwaZuluNatal were unaccounted for by the end of 2020 and were flagged as possible dropouts by the department.

The Western Cape led the pack with 5 147 matric pupils unaccounted for while in Gauteng the figure was 3 980.

In KwaZulu-Natal, 100 000 pupils were expected to write the matric exam and four percent of them were unaccounted for. In Limpopo, this figure was six percent.

The numbers of pupils who possibly dropped out are: 154 in the Eastern Cape; 784 in the Free State; 408 in Mpumalanga; 580 in the Northern Cape; 360 in the North West and 360 in the Western Cape.

According to the presentation, schools struggled to achieve complete curriculum coverage for2020. In Limpopo, Grade 11s finished 50% of the curriculum. In the Western Cape, completion hovered between 68% and 75% for most subjects with Gauteng not doing much better with 67% completion for English and 80% for its physical science curriculum.

In October, the department told parliament that based on analysis of household survey data, at least 50% of youths completed Grade 12 in the last few years.

“An alternative method of comparing the number of matric passes for a particular year to the 18-year-old population of the same year suggests that the figure could be as high as 56%”

School governing bodies have expressed concern that high school pupils may have faced the most pressure to drop out of school during the lockdown period sparked by the pandemic.

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