Durban - While the Ugu and uMlazi districts lead in the province for their matric class of 2020 passes, they had seen a decline, however their efforts for remaining in the 80 percentile was commended by district directors.
In 2019, Ugu had an 86.3% pass rate and the 2020 pass rate was 81.5% despite water challenges that were widely reported in the media. District director Mfundi Sibiya said teachers showed great commitment.
Sibiya attributed the success to a healthy working relationship between the teachers, the community, organised labour, district officials and all the municipalities in the district.
He said municipalities and structures were heavily involved in the success of the 90 percent rural district
“Where there were challenges, we did not seek answers but we sat down and discussed finding a way forward,” said Sibiya.
He also highlighted the important role played by subject advisers and added that the correct recruitment of officials to advise teachers was critical.
“If you don't have the right quality advisers and circuit managers you won’t get results. If you don’t have quality principals at schools and quality departmental heads at the level of subjects, if you don’t recruit quality educators at the level of each subject you won’t have it. For you to do that you then have to set up in the system a strong mechanism of identifying bad educators and advisers,” said Sibiya.
He said from the onset they discussed with teachers that the community was their primary employer.
“It is critical that at all times we respect them (the community) in terms of time management and state of readiness. We held a series of conversations with pupils. They needed to understand the workload and that if need be we must come early and leave late and also on weekends. Both Sadtu and Natu were spearheading the weekend teaching, they were dedicated without any extra cash, this is a strong commitment.”
uMlazi district placed second in the province and faced challenges in more rural areas of their districts, such as Umbumbulu.
The district dropped from 82% percent pass rate to 80.9%
uMlazi district director Ntokozo Cele said at the beginning of 2020 they looked back at the challenges from 2019 and found they had a lot of under performing schools.
“Curriculum coverage was not properly monitored. There was no evidence of this. We had to work on the skilling of those responsible for this so that they understood their role. We came up with intervention programmes that included morning, afternoon, spring, weekend classes. We had to look into the resources we had in the district such as lead educators, we then did a district academic improvement plant and custom per school,” he said.
The Daily News