Is South Africa's Education System Really In Crisis ?

Culled from www.bbc.co.uk

By Milton NkosiBBC News, Johannesburg

South Africa's minister of education openly admits that the country's schools are in a state of crisis. How did we get here and what needs to be done?

Angie Motshekga did not mince her words when she addressed her colleagues at a recent African National Congress (ANC) gathering.

"If 25% [of students] fail, we must have sleepless nights," she is quoted in local media as saying.

"This is akin to a national crisis."

Not about the money

The shocking statistic is that some 213,000 children failed their end of school examination for the academic year ending last month, out of a total of nearly 800,000.

But that is just half the story, as there is also a massive drop-out rate.

This is not about a lack of funding. In fact, South Africa spends more on education, some 6% of GDP, than any other African country.According to Stellenbosch University's Professor Servaas van der Berg, out of the 1.2 million seven-year-olds who enrolled in Grade 1 in 2002, slightly less than half went on to pass their school-leaving exam, the matric, 11 years later.

But quality education for everyone is not there, as in many global studies South Africa often comes near the bottom in maths and science tests.

The cancer lies deep in the education system and the continuing legacy of apartheid, and parents know this.

'Packed like sardines'

One of the most depressing sites in post-apartheid South Africa is the bussing of black children out of townships like Johannesburg's Soweto.

Children are packed like sardines into mini-buses and driven long distances, some over 30km (19 miles) away, to the schools in the former whites-only suburbs.

Some will be travelling to private schools, but the majority go to the state-funded schools which are better resourced and have better teachers than their equivalents in the townships, mirroring the situation during apartheid.

At that time, the white minority government spent four times more on a white child's education than it did on a black child. This disparity is no longer the case, but the legacy is still there.

Leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance Mmusi Maimane explained the legacy of that system recently when he spoke about the scourge of racism.

"We are entitled to ask why a black child is 100 times more likely than a white child to grow up in poverty," he said.

"We are entitled to ask why a white learner is six times more likely to get into university than a black learner."

Rather than disagree, the education minister chimes in.

"Twenty years down the line we still have the legacy of apartheid," Ms Motshekga told the BBC, "we still have teachers who were not trained for the future".

Poor teaching

There are many schools in the townships and the government has built more schools in these areas since the advent of democracy, but quality teaching and a proper structured learning process is lacking.

The most tragic anecdote of how serious the problem is comes from a World Bank study conducted in rural Limpopo province back in 2010.

The study asked 400 12-year-old students to work out the answer for 7 x 17.

To work it out, the pupils first drew 17 sticks and counted them seven times. Some 130 of the 400 got the right answer.

But when the same question was presented in word form in English, things spiralled downwards.

Researchers asked the students: "If there are seven rows of 17 chairs how many chairs are there?" None of the children answered correctly.

So language and the quality of teachers are huge areas of concern.

There are 11 official languages in South Africa but most teaching is in English, especially for subjects such as maths and science.

Professor John Volmink, chairman of the education quality assurance body Umalusi, has studied the relationship between the language of instruction and how students perform.

"It remains true that candidates writing the examination in a language other than their home language continue to experience great difficulty in interpreting questions and phrasing their responses," he is quoted in the the City Press newspaper as saying.

"Teachers' knowledge of English has to be upgraded. Unless we [support them], results will continue to drop."

All that aside, the education minister is also taking on the unions, who are seen to be part of the problem by appearing unwilling to tackle absenteeism.

Some teachers are not turning up to work for parts of the week, which means that students over time can lose out on months, if not years, of learning.

But Ms Motshekga told the BBC that she wants to take the politics out of education.

"I fight a lot with unions behind closed doors, I don't call the media to make a show of it," she said.

"I do it responsibly in a manner that corrects the wrong but keeps the system together."

'There is hope'

But with all of the above, it is not all doom and gloom. There are schools which continue to produce good grades under some of the most difficult circumstances.

In Sibasa, Limpopo province, where students regularly struggle without some of the most basic equipment, Mbilwi Secondary School achieved a 100% pass rate for the school leaving exam.

And there are many private schools that are producing well-educated students every year.

As Mr Van der Berg aptly put it: "We don't want people who made it in spite of the system."

The Quality Of An Education System Cannot Exceed The Quality Of Its Teachers

To improve the quality of education in Africa and other developing countries, we must all operate from the standpoint that teachers are critical the development of our education system.

Here are excerpts from an article by Ara Santiago- Teacher Quality: A new teaching force culled from the Inter-American Development Bank website.

The current literature supports the fact that teachers are the main driver of in-school effects on student attainment. Further, it provides evidence on the difference made by a good and effective teacher; counteracting other negative effects, such as a disadvantaged background 



Teachers are the essential link in the chain from education spending to student learning, so improving teacher effectiveness is a critical component for improving student outcomes. Teacher effectiveness in turn depends on: (a) skills and knowledge – whether they know what to teach and the best way to teach it, and (b) teacher behavior in the classroom – whether they do their best to apply what they know? 

The context in which teachers work has significantly changed over the past decade, yet teaching has not been sufficiently adapted to these new situations: teachers basically continue to have the same preparation and toolkit that they had before. Unless actions to update teaching to the new environment take place, there will not be a substantial improvement in quality in the system and corresponding reduction in inequalities.

This implies a new challenge to update the profession in a rapidly changing environment and in the unlikely perspective of increases in spending as those of the past decade. The improvement of human resources (i.e. teachers, technical staff, and principals) has become the main education-related concern for most countries in LAC

http://www.iadb.org

Are Single-Sex Schools or Mixed Schools The Way Forward?

Culled from www.telegraph.co.uk

Do boys and girls benefit from being taught together? Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, says 'yes', Helen Fraser, chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust, says 'no'

By Richard Cairns, Helen Fraser

8:59AM GMT 17 Mar 2015

182 Comments

As Tony Little, the headmaster of Eton, says that single-sex education allows students to "be themselves" until later in life, we ask two leading figures in education for their opinions.

See who you agree with, take part in our poll at the end and join the debate.

Richard Cairns is head of Brighton College in East Sussex, which was named UK School of the Year 2013-14 at the Independent Schools Awards

Open any school prospectus and you’ll see the same vision outlined: to prepare children for adult life, both academically and socially. And yet, some people still seem to believe this can be achieved in the highly artificial environment of a single-sex school. I find it very curious.

Whether you’re starting a degree or embarking on a career, it’s obviously vital that you’re able to get on well with people of both genders.

Recent research published in the American journal Science suggests that women who attended single-sex colleges were “compromised in the workplace as their ability to network and cooperate with men was inhibited”.

This is hardly surprising. In a coeducational school such as Brighton College, boys and girls learn together, converse together and grow into adulthood together. They’re at ease with one another and, in my personal experience, more at ease with themselves.

I’ve worked in both single sex and mixed schools, and know there are good schools of both types. But it has always struck me that mixed schools are much kinder places. There’s little of the emotional intensity that bedevils girls’ schools and often leads to bullying — interestingly, when I ask girls from single-sex schools why they’re keen to join the sixth form at Brighton College, this is what they tend to tell me.

Nor is there the sense that you get at some all-boys schools that only those who play in the First XV are relevant. At mixed schools boys are much more likely to dance, sing and act. In my first week here, I witnessed a rather gentle young man being lauded by a group of girls for his performance in a play.

y.

^{In mixed schools, pupils are at ease with one another and with themselves}

Everyone respects — and, indeed, admires — each other, which is a wonderful thing to witness.

It used to be argued that girls do better academically — particularly in stereotypically “male” subjects — when there are no boys around to distract or inhibit them. But decades of research in the UK and further afield has cast serious doubt on this.

The Science research I mentioned earlier reports that such arguments relied on “weak, cherrypicked or misconstrued scientific claims” and that, in fact, there is evidence “sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimises institutional sexism”.

And the real reason some all-girls schools have a strong track record in traditionally “masculine” subjects, such as physics, is that they’re highly selective institutions. Quite simply, clever girls are more likely to study physics than those of average ability. Whether they are sharing classes with boys is a much less significant factor.

It was Plato who first argued that boys and girls should be taught together. I suspect he’d be thrilled by the direction in which things are moving. Even in the independent sector, seen as the last bastion of segregated schooling, only 10 per cent of boys and 16pc of girls are now educated in single-sex schools. And that number is likely to fall further.

There are now a third fewer girls’ schools and half as many boys’ schools as there were 20 years ago — a trend surely set to continue.

Nothing could be more natural, nor more sensible."

Helen Fraser is chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST), the UK’s leading network of independent girls’ schools

I’m often asked “Why should I choose a single-sex school?” From a purely personal perspective, I benefited enormously from attending one — as did my daughters and step-daughters. But our experiences are backed up by the research: extensive studies have shown that, for a variety of reasons, girls’ learning needs are simply different from boys’.

In the classroom, girls tend to prefer cooperative, discussion-based learning, focused on real-world scenarios. They’re usually better equipped to plan and organise their work, and take well to projects, too.

There will always be exceptions but on the whole, in a mixed classroom, boys tend to dominate discussions, frequently putting themselves forward as leaders in group activities. Girls, meanwhile, are inclined to hold back.

It follows that teachers will, subconsciously, try to play to boys’ strengths in order to get the best out of them. So it’s really only in single-sex environments that girls can take centre stage.

Read the conclusion