Durban - Maths has to be offered as a subject choice to Grade 10s at all public schools next year, even those which have only been offering maths literacy, the Basic Education Department has announced.
The department is also mulling over policy amendments that would require pupils who take physical sciences, life sciences, accounting, geography, economics and agricultural sciences to take maths and not maths literacy.
In a circular to education MECs, exam quality watchdog Umalusi and publishers’ associations, the department instructed schools that did offer maths to increase the number of pupils who took the subject.
Schools intending to drop maths were warned not to. This was as the department worked to meet ambitious targets set for it by the National Development Plan.
On Tuesday the department revealed that a third type of maths – technical maths – would be introduced in technical schools in 2016.
Responding to parliamentary questions earlier this year, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said there were 327 schools at which no Grade 12 pupils were registered to write maths.
At the time she was unable to provide definite reasons , but now a team of officials from Pretoria is travelling the country to investigate.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the number of Grade 12 pupils who wrote maths in the final exams last year numbered more than 73 000, up from 63 168 in 2012.
There were roughly as many pupils in the class of 2013 who sat maths literacy, also up from 65 313 in 2012.
Nkosinathi Sishi, the head of the KZN Education Department, previously instructed schools not to allow physical science and accounting pupils to substitute maths literacy for maths.
These schools were “manipulating” the system - in part to protect their Grade 12 pass rates, Sishi said then.
While maths was based on abstract content and was required for admission to medicine, commerce, the sciences and engineering at universities, maths literacy taught pupils to read charts and calculate percentages to apply in daily life.
The circular from the national department states that it has the responsibility of nearly tripling the number of pupils passing maths and physical science.
By 2024, the department must have increased the number of pupils who pass maths to 350 000, and the number who pass physical science to 320 000.
Responding to questions about the circular, the deputy director-general in charge of curriculum in the Basic Education Department, Mathanzima Mweli, said the combination of physical science and maths literacy offered pupils “no career prospects”.
He was aware there were schools which offered neither maths nor maths literacy, in defiance of national policy.
He did not believe maths teachers would be hard to come by for schools which now only offered maths literacy.
There were instances in which teachers qualified to teach maths were made to teach other subjects, he said.
Speaking on the new technical maths subject, Mweli said it would be introduced at technical schools in 2016. It would coincide with the introduction of technical physical science in Grade 10 at technical schools.
The Mercury