Durban - The director-general of the Department of Basic Education, Mathanzima Mweli, has urged parents to encourage their children to enrol in subjects related to business studies or the country will soon have to import these skills.
While giving a technical briefing on the 2022 Grade 12 performance, Mweli said the country had a problem with the enrolment in some gateway subjects.
His briefing, which was delivered shortly before the release of the Grade 12 results on Thursday, covered many aspects of the education system, including the drop-out rate that has seen thousands of pupils being lost from the system over the past 12 years.
“We do have a problem in subjects including accounting, business studies and economics. If there is any message that I would like to convey to places of worship and to social gatherings, it’s for parents to encourage their children to enrol for these subjects.
“Sooner or later we will (have to) import chartered accountants and economists if we do not ensure that we get more pupils enrolling for these subjects,” he warned.
In his briefing, Mweli also touched on the concerns over the drop-out rate. He said they believed that use of English as a medium of instruction and the “culling” of pupils by schools were contributing factors.
“In Grade 1 you had 1.1 million pupils. Why is it that in Grade 12 you have 775 000 pupils?” he said was a question often asked.
Mweli revealed that pupils start dropping out from Grade 5, as schools begin to use English as a medium of instruction.
The report tracking the progress of 2022 pupils showed that when they started in Grade 1 in 2011 there were 1.1 million pupils and this number remains above a million through the grades but, in Grade 5, this number drops to 979 000.
The number remains in the 900 000 figure through the grades until Grade 10, when it spikes again to more than a million.
“The explanation that curriculum experts are giving is that from Grade 4 these pupils start to use English as
the language of learning and teaching and that starts to have an impact on them.
“What is also important about this data is that when you go to Grade 10, the numbers start to increase.
“The answer seems to be, given the fact that we are starting to prepare pupils for Grade 12, those that are not fit for purpose are not allowed to proceed to Grade 11 so (there is) a bit of gatekeeping and culling of pupils begins in Grade 10,” he said.
Civil society organisation Equal Education said that the traditional pass rate was a poor indicator of the education sector’s overall health.
“The national pass rate does not accurately reflect the true state of the education system in South Africa because it masks conditions – such as learners dropping out of the school system before their matric year.”
Equal Education added that the overall pass rate, the number of Bachelor passes from pupils attending quintile 1-3 schools (no-fee-paying schools), overall provincial performance trends, particularly in rural provinces, and most importantly the throughput rate should be scrutinised, as these indicators gave a better picture of the true pass rate.