IRIN Focus on education crisis

If the depth of South Africa’s education crisis was ever in doubt, the national results of this year’s school-leaving exam have proved sobering: Over half of all students failed. The average pass rate for the matriculation exam, the annual rite of passage for all high school leavers, fell slightly to 48.9 percent from last year’s 49.3 percent. The worst results were from mainly rural provinces, where issues of race and gender predominate, with bottom of the ladder Northern Province scoring an improved 35.2 percent. Apartheid’s legacy “For several years we have been talking of a crisis,” Jenny Coulsen an education specialist at the University of Natal told IRIN. “We are inheriting problems of the past, and the challenge is transformation, not just tinkering, and that challenge is immense.” Education accounts for the highest proportion of social services spending in the country. However, the historical legacy of under-funding means deep structural inequalities, with the impact felt most in rural areas where crumbling school buildings and overcrowded classes are common. “Resource provisioning is one of the key reasons for the low pass rate,” Coulsen said. It is compounded by the problem of under-qualified and under-motivated teachers and underprivileged students for many of whom English is a foreign language. “The majority of children are coming from homes with extreme poverty where there is no access to reading materials,” she added. “I think there is a crisis of management in the system,” Jonathan Paulus at the Centre for Education Policy said. “Although there are few resources, a lot of poorly resourced schools are doing fairly well.” That is despite what he described as an absence of “a culture of learning and teaching” in South African schools. Apartheid’s other legacy was that schools were important sites of resistance to the authorities, where ‘Liberation Before Education’ and ‘Pass One Pass All’ were popular slogans. “A group culture has taken hold in schools,” Paulus said, typically characterised by lack of student discipline or professionalism among the teachers. Tools for the job According to Shireen Motala of the Education Policy Unit at Witwatersrand University, “the irony is we have excellent policies and innovative views, but the conditions on the ground don’t exist to implement these things meaningfully.” For her, one of the keys to transformation is “effective leadership” at the level of principals and teachers, with “strong parental participation”. Paulus said that research suggests that a key variable in the performance of a school is the quality of the principal. South Africa’s new education minister Kader Asmal has recognised this, and among the government’s new initiatives is to hold school management more accountable. Asmal has presented a nine-point plan to transform education. Among the goals are the strengthening of management and administration, the revitalisation of schools as centres of community life, a new “outcomes-based” education system to ensure “active learning” rather than instruction by rote, the development of the professional quality of teachers, and heightened HIV/AIDS education. Most education specialists have applauded Asmal’s vision. “There is hope for the future and I think things are turning around,” Motala said. But a review of the government’s new priorities by Motala’s Education Policy Unit cautioned that the challenge is effective delivery. “The minister has to move quickly from critical observations and vision to action, and to distinguish between what can and cannot be accomplished,” the report said.