Fresh focus on education required
QUALITY assurance body Umalusi will today officially approve the 2019 matric results. It is also expected to provide insight into how it has gone about assessing the examinations.
On Tuesday, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga will announce the outcome of the exams.
As usual, this period marks a time when thousands of pupils who wrote the exams, in anticipation of receiving a National Senior Certificate, will learn how well they performed.
It is also a time when critics will come out in numbers to repeat the same old rhetoric, without providing practical or tangible solutions.
Either way, this time always provides a chance for parents and the government to reflect on whether the education the average child obtains by the end of their school-going years is enough to equip them with the skill sets they need to progress to university or technical and vocational education and training colleges, and later to the workplace.
For years, we have been a country that uses matric results to benchmark ourselves against other countries, and to trample on the fact that we rank dismally when it comes to mathematics and science. But times have changed.
In the era of the 4th industrial revolution, our fixation with, and alarm over the country’s public education system, should no longer be limited to the release of Grade 12 results. The future of work is very different. In fact, analysts have predicted that “85% of the jobs that today’s students will be doing in 2030 haven’t yet been invented”. Recruiters have been told to look for candidates with the skills to become, among others, earthquake forecasters, human-machine team managers and drone traffic optimisers.
Therefore, over the next 10 years, our primary and high schools should focus on ensuring pupils in grades 1-11 are well versed in mathematics, science and all other required subjects.
Our criticism should rather be redirected at ensuring that our pupils become proficient in many subjects. It’s no use trying to crack the whip, and then wondering where we have gone wrong as a nation with Grade 12.
Instead, when matric results are released we should not only celebrate percentages in pass rates, but get to a point where we know that the quality of education our children have received in their 12 years of schooling is good enough to land them jobs wherever they go in the world.