Reasons for pupil dropouts examined

Pupils are more likely to leave school before matric if they have to repeat a grade or have other disruptions to their lives, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a report by the Zero Dropout Campaign.

The campaign wants government to introduce a way to track pupils to help identify those more susceptible to dropping out.

The likelihood of repeating grades doubles when pupils reach high school. And this increases the odds of them dropping out.

Beauvallon Secondary School in Valhalla Park, Cape Town reported having a dropout rate of 17% last year.

Principal Leonard Jansen said the school had started the 2020 academic year with 272 pupils, but 47 had dropped out. The school’s matric pass rate was 32%.

Jansen said the school relied on the Western Cape education department’s central education management information system to track pupils at risk of dropping out. If a pupil was chronically absent, the system alerted teachers that they needed intervention.

“We’ll send out letters to the parents if the [pupil] has been absent for more than 10 consecutive days. An official from the department delivers the letters to the parents.

“From there, parents have to respond as soon as possible and come into the school to speak to the teacher and principal.”

The pupil is not allowed back at school until the parents visit.

“Less than 40% of quantile one to four [pupils] are the right age for their grade, meaning a greater proportion of [pupils] in our schools have already repeated a grade at least once,” said Zero Dropout Campaign director Merle Mansfield during the virtual release of the report on Thursday last week. “So they already have a greater risk for dropping out.

“The pandemic exacerbated disruptions” to pupils’ lives with lockdowns and school closures, which resulted in more falling behind in their set classwork.”

There is no concrete data on the total number of pupils who dropped out last year, but by 9 October, the department of basic education reported there were about 320 000 pupils who could not be accounted for.

“Just tracking [academic performance, behaviour and chronic absenteeism] through an integrated risk report allows us to flag when a [pupil] starts showing risk factors or levels of disengagement in the classroom,” said Mansfield.

Kerry Mauchline of the Western Cape education department said all schools in the province had school improvement plans (SIPs), which included interventions to reduce pupil dropouts.

This “avoids the practice of ‘culling’ to improve pass rates”, she said. “Culling involves losing weak [pupils] along the way, so schools and provinces can achieve a higher pass rate.”

– GroundUp