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Minister's move an acknowledgement of the failure of the OBE system
The DA welcomes the gradual phase-out of the system so as to prevent disruption to students and teachers
Shift to content-based education and focus on textbooks consistent with the DA's education policies in the places we govern





The Democratic Alliance (DA) hopes that today's announcement by the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, of changes to the education curriculum will be the beginning of a long-needed process to overhaul an eduction system that was failing our students. The Minister's announcement today is a welcome acknowledgement of one of the most significant problems in our National Education policy over the last decade, as it is a move away from the widely disparaged Outcomes Based Education (OBE), which the department has been stubbornly adhering to despite all indications of failure.

The key intervention is a return to and far greater focus on the use of textbooks and content knowledge which, if properly implemented, will hopefully lead to an improvement in education outcomes throughout South Africa. The revised curriculum plan will also relieve the administrative burden from teachers, as teachers in every subject in each grade will have a single, comprehensive and concise Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement that will provide details on what teachers ought to teach and assess on a grade-by-grade and subject-by-subject basis. This key development will see teachers being able to focus on their core responsibility, which is to teach, and allow them to devote more time and resources to their students.

Today's announcement by the minister, and the gradual move away from the widely acknowledged disastrous OBE curriculum policy, is a positive move in the right direction by the Minister and her department. The DA has been consistently arguing for a focus on textbooks and content-knowledge, along with the approach to the acquisition of skills strategies we have introduced in the Western Cape. We believe there has to be a balance between content-knowledge and skills acquisitions; skills acquisition being the intention of OBE, but it had been over-emphasized. In the deliberations in the run-up of this announcement, our administration in the Western Cape rightly insisted on a carefully planned phased implementation of a new curriculum. It is pleasing to see that this has been heeded, as this decision has averted the education system being placed under unnecessary strain.

OBE was the disastrous redesign of South Africa's school curriculum that was introduced by South Africa's first education minister, Sibusiso Bhengu in 1998. While we clearly needed to move away from the old apartheid era curriculum, Minister Bhengu's alternative consisted of a range of incoherent, unstructured new teaching tools which left South Africa's teachers, already poorly trained, even more confused and poorly prepared. The Minister and the government were warned by countless experts at the time that the curriculum, which focused on teachers developing their own tools and materials and took the emphasis off rigorous learning, would be a disaster, but all this advice was ignored, and OBE entered the South African classroom in 1998 even as it was being abandoned in other, better-resourced, countries as a failure.

Of course, this acknowledgment today comes too late for the thousands of students who suffered as a result of the implementation of OBE, as well as for those teachers who had unnecessary and unfair pressure placed on them by the system. However, the last thing that students and teachers needed was a rapid disruption to the current system which would have placed them at an even greater disadvantage. As such, the Department is to be congratulated on its decision to exercise some degree of caution in its phasing out of the present system - precisely the caution and consideration that it did not display in its decision to implement the present system in the first place. The phased roll-out of a new system will, we believe, serve our students well.

I will be writing to the chairperson of the Basic Education portfolio committee to request that the Minister appear before the committee to furnish the new education strategy in detail to ensure that both students and teachers are adequately served.