Get ready for a matric results shocker – expert

Given the inequalities in South African society were widened by Covid-19, a significant drop in the release of matric results should be expected today, Unesco Chair on Open Distance Learning (ODL) at Unisa Professor Moeketsi Letseka cautioned yesterday.

“Professor Servaas van der Berg of Stellenbosch University projects just over 5% decline from the 81.3% pass rate achieved in 2019, and I think he’s being nice,” said Letseka.

“My view, is that it is going to be worse than that.”

Pointing to the second year-on-year drop in IEB results, Letseka notes that the drop was significant because of the small numbers of pupils who wrote the final exam last year (13 163). And that was despite having the financial resources, and Wi-Fi, and who could shuffle between devices to combat the restrictions brought on by the virus, Letseka noted.

“The conditions of 2020 meant pupils had to go home. Homes are not ideal for learning, homes are for parents, and parents cannot teach,” Letseka said.“In my view, Covid exposed the worst of glaring inequalities.”An estimated 1 058 699 pupils sat for the department of basic education final examination last year.

Myriad reports have shown public schools were ill-prepared for pupils in 2021, which means in 2020, they were already in shambles, compounding the forced stay-at-home effect brought on by the virus. And it goes back farther, with Amnesty International saying in a new report, Failing to learn lessons: The impact of Cov-id-19 on a broken and unequal education system, “how students from poorer communities have been cut off from education during extended school closures”.

The report noted in 2018, out of 23 471 public schools, only 19% had illegal pit latrines for sanitation, with 37 schools having no sanitation facilities at all; 86% having no laboratory; 77% having no library; 72% having no internet access and 42% having no sports facilities. Michael Komape, Lumke Mketwa, Lister Magongwa, Lister Magongwa and Siyamthanda Mtunu are the pupils we know about who died in school pit latrines.

Letseka said informal settlements were becoming the new normal in SA, and it was the children living in them in abject poverty who were depend-ing on Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga for quality public education. In 2019, Stats SA, together with the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (Saldru) and the Agence Francaise de Développement, found the labour market income was the main driver of income inequality in South Africa, contributing 74.2% towards overall income inequality in the country in 2015.

However, the stay-at-home government dictate meant par-ents/caregivers/guardians who were supposed to be out scraping money together were not able to do so and were further unable to help children as they themselves were barely literate.SA also took a huge smack in jobs lost, with the number of unemployed persons increased by 2.2 million to 6.5 million compared to the second quarter of 2020, according to Stats SA.

Amnesty International’s report went on to say 239 schools lacked any electricity and many of the shortcomings “are in breach of not just the government’s international human rights obligations” but its own “minimum norms and standards” for educational facilities”.

On Friday, Khume Ramulifho, MPL and Democratic Alliance Gauteng Shadow MEC for education, visited three schools in Diepsloot, east of Johannesburg, and discovered schooling had not resumed at Diepsloot Secondary School “due to no water and electricity, while the ablution facilities and mobile classrooms have been vandalised”.

On Wednesday, The Citizen reported pupils from several communities in Limpopo could not access their schools on Monday and Tuesday due to flooding rivers, collapsed classrooms and shortages of personal protective equipment.

– amandaw@citizen.co.za

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