Unplaced pupils: Parents’ preference for ‘suburb schools’ blamed

While the department of basic education (DBE) has attributed the thousands of unplaced pupils to parent preference when applying for schools, many parents said they were flocking to suburban schools to seek quality education for their children.

Parent Mary Seloshe said although some schools in the township produced great results, many of them struggled with resources, bad publicity, crime, and never held to the same standard.

“Some schools nowadays include programming in the curriculum, and also an advanced programme mathematics class, to help kids understand and love maths,” she said.

“And even though not all suburban schools have those extra subjects, township schools lack even the basics, such as extracurricular activities like swimming, tennis, volleyball,” she said.

However, the Congress of South African Students (Cosas) called for the school curriculum to be transformed to ensure that all schools and pupils across the country received quality education, which was more skill-based than theory.

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Cosas spokesperson Douglas Ngobeni said the quality of education should not be determined by where pupils went to school. However, pupils should all be taught subjects that prepared them for life after matric and did not force them to go to university, he said.

“We need a career-orientated curriculum, which seeks to say that if a child is taught agriculture in school, he or she can easily be practical with it after matric,” Ngobeni said.

Meanwhile, One Movement leader Mmusi Maimane has also called on the department to change some of the subjects in the curriculum, of which the standard undermined pupils’ intellect.

He created a petition to end South Africa’s 30% matric pass mark.

“We must reward good teachers. We must remove bad teachers and attract new talent.”

Parent Gorden Selepe said both Cosas and Maimane were correct and he agreed that skills-based subjects would be better.

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za

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