Durban - With less than three weeks to go until about 170 000 KwaZulu-Natal matric pupils sit for their final matric exams under the new Caps curriculum, some education stakeholders have raised concerns about the system.
They say Caps (Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement) - heralded as the best curriculum in the new South Africa - is too time-focused and does not allow teachers enough time to do remedial work with pupils, as the curriculum is strict on how and when sections should be taught.
“If children struggle with concepts, teachers have to move ahead, there is no time to slow down and enable students to grasp the work,” said the KZN Parents Association’s South Durban chairman, Vee Gani. “The solution is that teachers have to work with the children outside of class, but that becomes difficult because there are transport issues and the teacher may have commitments.”
Gani said the general consensus from teachers was that it was causing pupils to suffer.
Pupils should have been compelled to go to school and do revision with their teachers during the current week-long holiday, but this was not the case, he said.
Anthony Pierce, the KZN chief executive of the National Professional Teachers Organisation of SA (Naptosa), said the previous curriculums had failed because teachers were not given an opportunity to contribute to their formulation.
Teachers had been consulted for Caps, but there was room to address concerns, he said. He said Caps was “here to stay,” and that they were worried officials in the national Department of Basic Education and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education were not able to respond to concerns when they arose.
The assessment of pupils, the time allocation for subjects and the maths content in the new curriculum were some of the concerns, he said. The union had sent a questionnaire to its members to highlight specific concerns, and the responses would be sent to the basic education department.
“The intention is to say these are the concerns, if no attempts are made to address them, we can promise the department that all will not be well in delivering the curriculum,” Pierce said.
He said teachers were not calling for another curriculum change, but for a revision of some of the content that was being taught.
“Learners who are not able to grasp the concepts have to rely on extra tuition, parents or siblings. Time plays a huge role and with the impact of large numbers (in the classroom), there is no time to do remedial work, but it is definitely better than what we have had in the past 20 years,” Pierce said.
Allen Thompson, the National Teachers Union spokesman, said Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga had to be congratulated for enabling a swift shift to Caps.
He said teachers had complained about the previous Outcomes Based Education (OBE) curriculum, saying they were doing a lot of administrative work rather than teaching.
Caps had been received well by its members, but there were challenges. “Caps does not accommodate that pupils are not the same; teachers have less time to deal with pupils who are struggling, because there are specific and direct curriculum expectations of the teacher and the pupil,” he said.
Thompson said Caps appeared to be moving back to the Nated 550 curriculum, the last curriculum enforced before 1994, which highlighted the importance of textbook use and had clear expectations.
OBE, on the other hand, did not recommend textbook use, focused more on equipping pupils with skills and had no clear definitive ways to teach, he said. Pierce said under OBE, teachers were creating their own versions of the curriculum, and with Caps it was helpful that teachers were given specific guidelines.
Provincial education department officials could not be reached for comment.
In a statement on the department’s website, Isaac Luthuli, a spokesman for Education MEC Peggy Nkonyeni, said matric revision DVDs for maths and science pupils had been donated to the department by the Swarasti Institute. The DVDs would be used at the department’s spring intervention classes this week which aim to improve on KZN’s 2013 matric pass rate of 77.4 percent.
Daily News