Covid-19 disruptions may impact outcomes in Grade 12 up to 2031, says expert

It’s going to be a long road back for this year’s crop of pupils as next year’s lot wait in the wings while resources lessen in an economy on its knees.

“We are in a two-year limbo period,” said education analyst and activist Papama Mnqandi. “There’s going to be two years of recovery at least, because remember, this is tied to the recovery of the economy as well. So they can say tomorrow the disease is over, the restrictions are lifted, but economic demand will have to be restarted. Then only after that will people begin to return to the public sphere.

“What do you do while in limbo? Do you continue to let people wait, or do you implement a literacy programme while they wait?

“Now [President Cyril Ramaphosa] is telling us we’re coming back in August. It suggests to me because we are a quantitatively-based education measuring system, we don’t really care about what happens to these kids. We want them to move along to the next grade.”

Cognitive ability and comprehension were easier to work on remotely while the government pulled its act together, said Mnqandi. He noted it was important for government to sit down with education stakeholders and tell them that it didn’t know everything – and work out the best solution possible.

While Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga may have gone some way towards this when she met 60 organisations this week, it was too little, too late with the education year for government schools already rolled over to 2021. Mnqandi said the school year should have been closed permanently in March, and something innovative sought.

“I was saying once you go for a literacy programme, you have the rest of the year to roll out tablets and the digital infrastructure,” he said. “You also run the risk of exposure because these children will be at home and using this period to transform families to engender a culture of learning from home, so schooling is not just something which happens at school.”

Writing for Daily Maverick, associate professor at Stellenbosch University and education policy expert Martin Gustafsson said data available to him suggested the “current disruptions could lead to below expected outcomes in Grade 12 to as far as 2031, which would be devastating for skills generation”.

“Children presently in the lower primary grades are likely to suffer especially serious longterm consequences. If foundational skills are not built up at the appropriate age, remediation at later grades becomes almost impossible. We should bear in mind that learning in schools does not work in neat packages of whole academic years.

“Learning is a delicate and continuous process, meaning that even a year with some interruptions is far better than prolonged and blanket school closures.”

However, the years of neglect of infrastructure was another issue that exposed a massive failing on the part of the education department.

Shenilla Mohamed, executive director of Amnesty International SA, said the department of basic education had to work urgently with the department of water to ensure all schools in South Africa had access to water and sanitation without delay.

“There is no better time to fix South Africa’s poor education infrastructure,” Mohamed said.

“Empty schools provide the perfect opportunity for workers to build infrastructure in schools without risking their health.”

– amandaw@citizen.co.za

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