Etienne Creux

Distraught parents and pupils at the college where six out of 24 matric pupils failed. Picture: Etienne Creux

A Pretoria mother is fed-up after her son and a several of his classmates at a private school in the city failed their matric exam.

Putting the blame on the school, the woman says the school must be closed so that the same thing doesn’t happen to other children.

“Six (pupils) failed two or more subjects,” said the woman, who does not want to be named as she is still trying to come to terms with her son’s dismal results.

“What can I do? Even if he rewrites, he is apparently so far behind he can’t catch up by next month to write supplementary exams,” said the desperate woman.

She said her son attended a state school, but she took him out in Grade 10 because she was told the private school was so good. “(The school’s motto) is ‘the child comes first’ and if there are problems they say they will work on them,” said the mother.

Paying fees of R20 000 a year, the woman said she knew her son was struggling with maths and paid for extra classes. “I went to the school and they kept reassuring me that he would pass.”

She claims that a number of teachers left during the year.

“They were given the chemistry work just three weeks before the mock exams,” she said.

According to the woman, the school’s principal, Wikus Bruwer, merely shrugged his shoulder when confronted by parents on Thursday.

However, Bruwer disputed the allegations.

According to him, 24 pupils at the school wrote matric, and of those, six had failed.

Of the six, one did not submit a portfolio for life orientation and the other had not turned up to write the exam.

He attributed their failure to lack of class attendance and the parents’ insistence that their children should continue with subjects they had failed at public school.

“There are attendance registers which the mentors mark during each class, and many of those who had failed were not attending.

“We don’t force pupils to attend, because we are primarily a mentoring institution.

“We advise parents and pupils on which subject they should take based on their performances from previous schools, but they don’t always listen. We tell them we are willing to take the learners if they are willing to work hard, but we can’t guarantee they will pass,” Bruwer said.

He said he had not heard of classes being cancelled owing to teachers not being present. He added that teachers were always in attendance and those who resigned were replaced immediately.

“The maths and science teachers were here all year round; only the IT teacher left, but was immediately replaced. No one failed IT.

“I used to teach life orientation, but I stopped when another teacher took over. I again started teaching life orientation when that teacher left,” said Bruwer. He added that he had arranged meetings between parents and mentors. He claimed that some of the parents would turn up late for these meetings, by which time the mentors had gone.

Eksamenraad vir Christelike Onderwys (Erco), the independent examination body that the school falls under, said some of the pupils had failed a subject or two. The head of examinations, Theuns de Wet, said 11 candidates from the school wrote the Erco examination. He would not reveal the pass rate.

Bruwer said the other 13 pupils wrote under the auspices of another institution. The attendance certificates they offered all had a credit value and were recognised by an e-learning university, as well as by other tuition centres and colleges, he added. - Pretoria News Weekend

karabo.seanego@inl.co.za