Call for education sector reforms

Another abysmally low final school examination pass rate has sparked calls for Namibia's education sector to be reformed. Of the 13,850 students who sat the grade 12 school-leaving exams in 2005, only 2,840 qualified for admittance to the University of Namibia and the Polytechnic of Namibia, the education ministry's Directorate of National Examinations announced last week. Neville Andre, secretary general of the Namibia National Students Organisation (NANSO), described the high failure rate as a "social catastrophe" and commented that the more than 10,000 students who had failed to qualify would join the other "moral degenerates on the streets". A shortage of skilled primary teachers, inadequate classrooms to accommodate the growing school population and promoting ill-prepared students to higher grades were some of the fundamental problems in the country's education sector. "Every year we end up with very few students eligible for admission into universities," said Daniel Motinga, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Research, a Windhoek-based think-tank. He pointed out that most primary school teachers in rural northern Namibia could not even converse in English. "When students have failed to learn the basics at the primary level, how can one expect them to perform at a senior level?" Namibia has been considering how to revitalise its education system since last year, with the emphasis on recruiting qualified science and English teachers. Many schools have been churning out graduates who cannot speak and write English, which was adopted as an official language at independence from South Africa in 1990. While the ministry described this year's grade 12 results as having improved, NANSO's Andre said the results were not impressive, as only 24 percent of the students had managed to pass the English test. "This [English] is one of the major contributory factors to the underperformance of our learners." Namibia devotes one-third of its budget to education, but Motinga said most of it went on salaries. "The government has to prioritise its spending on improving teacher skills and school infrastructure to keep up with the population." He pointed out that a flawed policy, allowing learners to be automatically promoted each year from grades one to nine, and again from grade 10 to 11, had been retained because schools did not have the room to allow ill-prepared students to repeat a year. He urged the government to shift its emphasis to improving vocational skills, "So if students fail to keep up, particularly in higher grades, they have the option to learn technical skills, so at least we will not be producing young unskilled Namibians." The Ministry of Education's permanent secretary, Vitalis Ankama, acknowledged the need to prioritise spending in a statement this week, and attributed the shortage of classrooms at the start of the school year to the influx of rural learners in urban schools.