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The Democratic Alliance (DA) calls on Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, to take the lessons of the poor results of the recent Annual National Assessments (ANAs) to heart and focus relentlessly on identifying and retaining good teachers while retraining or dismissing underperforming teachers. The Minister is scheduled to visit schools today to monitor how they are using the information gained from the ANAs to improve their performance. We believe that she needs to use this as an opportunity to get serious about the issue of teacher quality, especially in the field of mathematics, as teacher performance in front of the classroom defines whether our students become numerate or not.
According to the results of the ANAs, only 28% of Grade 3 students and 30% of Grade 6 students have the numeracy skills that they are supposed to. Basically, only one in three of our learners can count, and barely so. However, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMMS) reports over the years show that our pupils are as enthusiastic and curious about mathematics as any other. They are hungry for knowledge, but they often end up with teachers who are not up to the task. For instance, it is still not a requirement that mathematics teachers have mathematics degrees, though this would radically improve the quality of mathematics education in the classroom.
The DA believes that it is crucial to support, promote and retain high performing teachers who bring out the best in our children. This means that the Minister must actually try to identify who those teachers are through a monitoring system that tracks student performance as they learn under different teachers. Beyond that, she should also take the simple decision of extending the retirement age of competent mathematics teachers. She should also recruit expatriate South African and foreign mathematics teachers. And, just as importantly, she must also demand higher standards of the weak teachers by accelerating in-service and pre-service training for them so that they can achieve an equivalent understanding of mathematics as those who majored in it at varsity. Only this kind of commitment to our children will allow them to thrive at school and beyond.
As the Minister visits schools today to monitor their progress, I will be writing a parliamentary question to her – to monitor her progress – asking what she has learned from the ANA results and how she will improve the numeracy skills of our students.