INLSA
Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga says bad marks for Grade 9, particularly for mathematics, were very concerning.
Children in KwaZulu-Natal start school with high hopes of doing well in maths and language – and their results reflect this – but by Grade 9, they score an average of only 12 percent in maths (13 percent nationally).
Their home language score is marginally better – 38 percent in KZN and 43.4 percent nationally.
This was the finding of the Annual National Assessment released yesterday. The assessment tests all South African children at key points in their education career to ensure the system is meeting basic standards.
In September, about 7.2 million pupils from grades 1 to 9 from more than 20 000 schools across the country sat the tests.
The results for South Africa are dismal. Speaking after they were released yesterday Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said the outcome was not unexpected but the bad marks for Grade 9, particularly for mathematics, were very concerning.
“These results explain to a very large extent why, among many other reasons, we have such high failure and dropout rates at Grades 10 and 11,” the minister said.
Nicholas Spaull, an economist from Stellenbosch University, said it was unclear if the 2011 and 2012 assessments were of equal difficulty, or if the appropriate methods for equating difficulty levels across years and grades were followed.
“For example, how can the average (national) score for mathematics in 2012 drop from 68 percent in Grade 1 to 28 percent in Grade 3 – just two grades later? That is highly suspicious and probably reflects differences in test difficulty rather than mastery of the curriculum,” he said.
National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa president Basil Manuel said the poor performance in grades 6 and 9 maths was disconcerting and interventions that were in place were “clearly not good enough”.
“It is the training, or lack of it. It is the support, or lack of it. It is a systemic problem,” he said.
Motshekga said if fundamen- tals were not in place, chances were the next lap became more difficult.
“You have to get the fundamentals right and use that as the building blocks,” she said.
The dean of education at the University of Johannesburg, Professor Sarah Gravett agreed. “If you want to change results, the grounding in the very early years has to be very good. At the moment, the foundation is not good. Many of our teachers are not properly trained and do not understand how to work with young children and to develop their reading and numeracy skills.”
The national figures showed that by Grade 3, children’s education performance dipped significantly with an average score of 42 percent in maths and 52 percent in language.
By Grade 6, as they neared the end of primary school, children were achieving 26.7 percent in maths.
In high school children were floundering with an average mark in maths of 12.7 percent and 43.4 in home their language.
Grade 1 pupils in KwaZulu-Natal managed an average mark of 69 percent for maths – behind Gauteng, Free State and Western Cape but above the national average.
In language too, KZN’s Grade 1s bettered the national standard, with an average mark of 58.4 percent. |This was not maintained and slid steadily to the poor results recorded in Grade 9.
