Mat South failures a cause for concern

Mat South Province comes last every year when Grade 7 and Ordinary Level results are released.

For four or five years running now the province gets about 15 primary schools producing a 100% failure rate. This means that the entire school no child would have shown that they know more than 50% of what was impacted on them in nine years.

This year is no exception and our respected Provincial Education Director Mam' Thabela is quoted as saying she is happy that the province has overly performed better than it did last year (albeit it came last again) and not so much concerned about the zero percent pass rate schools. According to her these will be looked at in isolation later.

While I respect Mam Thabela as a great educationists and administrator I honestly don't find her comment to be the best she could have given in the circumstance.

What is worrying is that we are having the same scenario every year and every year its a whole different set of schools getting zero percent pass rate. Every year its the same story that the schools will be handled separately. However how little the overall pass rate has improved by, the mere fact that we continue to be bottom and continue to have schools scoring a zero in a seven to nine year course means that our problem is greater than the little improvement we got overall.

Our first step to addressing our issue is admitting we have a crisis than polish it with some small glory. I have been around the province seen some schools with up to 100 grade 7 pupils and such schools scoring 5% pass. Maybe we will talk the day we have 20 schools with 100 pupils each and 2000 children scoring a zero for us to see that we have a crisis.

Instead of every year tackling the individual schools that score a zero and victimising the respective school heads and teachers what we need now is a huge collective effort involving all in the community to try and figure out where our problem is and addressing it. Our children are failing and we can no longer afford to allow the trend to go on. Would like to urge Mam Thabela to take the matter a little broader than the 15 zero percent schools and think along the way of having consultative meetings with the communities and stakeholders to see how we can better our education as a province. Its no secret that we have more schools in the 1% to 10% pass rate and we would ignore them till they get a zero before addressing them.

Our education problems extend beyond just the class room and solving them must be extended beyond the classroom. This is now a matter for the whole community of Matabeleland South and the longer we ignore it as a collective the worse for us as a province.

Together we can for better.

Bekezela Maduma Fuzwayo is an independent social and political analyst. He writes in his personal capacity and this article was extracted from his personal Facebook page. He can be contacted on bekezelamaduma@yahoo.co.uk