By Angelique Serrao
From 2009 every Grade 9 pupil will be writing a national certificate whether they are leaving school or not.
This was one of five major policy changes announced by Minister of Education Naledi Pandor on Monday.
Other changes include proposals to:
Lower teacher pupil ratios;
Rearrange districts into smaller more manageable areas;
Get Internet into every school in the country by 2013; and,
Expand Further Education and Training Colleges.
But an education expert says that while these changes are positive they will make little difference to the poor academic performance of children in schools.
Through the new policy, Pandor hopes to ensure that every Grade 9 pupil will get a general education certificate if they decide to leave school after the grade.
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The exams, which will take place at the end of the Grade 9, will see pupils writing a national paper set for both English and maths and internal exams for other subjects.
"We want to ensure young people have a certificate on how they have achieved. Now they will be able to have a measurement on how ready they are to proceed to Grade 10," Pandor said.
The department also announced that it wanted to reduce class sizes, particularly in underprivileged areas so that classes have less than 40 children to one teacher.
Education spokesperson Lunga Ngqengelele said the ideal was a teacher-pupil ratio of 1:35 but currently some classes had as many as 60 children in one class. The new policy will now allow up to 5 percent of teacher posts to be distributed in a "pro-poor" manner.
Another policy which is set to shake up the education sector is the rearranging of districts.
Each school district will now be based on a smaller geographical area, along municipal lines and will comprise 300 schools.
Under those districts there will now also be sub-districts which will have 30 schools each.
The department is also planning on expanding the 50 Further Education and Training Colleges (FET) in the country. At present 14 000 students are enrolled at these colleges, but the department aims to get 1-million students into FET Colleges by 2014.
In addition, Pandor said a feasibility report had been done to see whether it was possible to get Internet technology into all schools by 2013.
"The report indicates that it is possible to reach our target, but some provinces have fallen behind. These are the Eastern Cape, Kwazulu-Natal and Limpopo," said Pandor.
Education expert Professor Jonathan Jansen said while he believed it was a very good idea to give Grade 9s a single certificate, he believed Pandor's changes were politically pleasing, but they would not do much to change education.
"I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that this will have no effect on the bottom line which is poor academic achievement in schools," said Jansen.
"The problem is that none of these things begin to address the very serious problem of children experiencing a different education system depending on where they are placed."
He said that lowering teacher pupil ratios has been on the cards since the 1990s, but the department doesn't have the capacity to say what the teacher pupil ration would be in many schools, particularly in rural areas.
"What we need to be worrying about is getting more children to stay in school, and those that do stay need to perform better," Jansen said.
- This article was originally published on page 2 of Pretoria News on August 05, 2008
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