WESTERN CAPE: Finger-pointing, but no solutions for improving pass rates in poor schools By Suné Payne
Just when Ferlon Christians from the African Christian Democratic Party asked that politics be removed from the conversation about turnaround strategies to improve the quality of passing for learners coming out of quintile 1-3 schools in the Western Cape — the poorest of the poor, — the ANC and the DA unsurprisingly did exactly that.
During the parliamentary sitting on Thursday afternoon, Christians asked what provincial MEC for education Debbie Schäfer and her team were going to do as a turnaround strategy to ensure matriculants from these schools pass with good marks.
In 2018, according to the Western Cape Education Department , 41,350 learners in the province passed the National Senior Certificate examinations. Of this number, there was a 42,3% Bachelor’s pass rate — a requirement for university admittance into the degree programmes.The proportion of Bachelor’s passes in Quintiles 1-3 has more than doubled since 2009. This is most significant in Quintile 1, where the Bachelor’s percentage increased from 8.7% in 2009 to 24.
After several interjections by the ANC’s Muhammad Khalid Sayed, deputy chief whip and party spokesperson on education, Schäfer said:Amid taunts, Schäfer managed to say:We can’t fix the fences, employ more teachers because there’s no money… we can’t employ teachers without more money… because of the ANC’s abject failure in the Eastern Cape, we’ve had more than 20,000 learners”.
The issue of families migrating from rural, poorer provinces such as the Eastern Cape and the Northern Cape for better employment and education opportunities dates back to former premier Helen Zille’s time in office, when she labelled children who come from the Eastern Cape as “At one point, Christians made things political too — asking for a debate on sex education in line with his party’s stance on this issue.
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