Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Basic Education (PCBE) has called for an improved partnership between the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and non-profit organisations (NPOs) under the education sector in South Africa.
Development Diaries gathered that the call was made after NPO Zero Dropout Campaign announced that it had recorded a zero percent dropout rate in schools across the country.
It is understood that South Africa has a 30 percent grade repetition rate.
According to research, one of the best ways to prevent dropouts is through effective tracking of learner progress, which would alert education officials when learners are at risk.
‘It is important for both parties to sit and engage first as to how the research can benefit all South African learners, but most importantly, the poor learners who tend to be more vulnerable to circumstances that can lead to exiting or disengaging school at an earlier rate’, Committee Chairperson Bongiwe Mbinqo-Gigaba said.
‘They should not be meeting for the first time at parliament’.
According to the Zero Dropout Campaign, Covid-19-related school closures and the economic shocks of lockdown were expected to worsen the dropout rate.
DBE told the committee that there was confusion in public discussions on the definition of the terms ‘dropout rate’, ‘throughput rate’, or ‘real matric pass rate’.
UIS Analytical Services see these rates as the percentage of children in a specific grade in a specific year who neither continue to the next grade nor repeat the same grade in the following year, rather than the percentage of learners who start grade one in a given year and then exit grade 12 in a particular year.
Source: Africa News
Photo source: Miville Tremblay
