Prega Govender
18 September 2005
Johannesburg — EDUCATION Minister Naledi Pandor has asked her officials to examine urgently the alarming number of pupils dropping out of public schools.
Pandor's acting Director-General for Planning and Monitoring, Firoz Patel, said that in a bid to monitor the drop-out rate, the government planned to introduce a national pupil record system to track the migration of pupils. It would be sending teams to about 300 schools at the beginning of next year to count pupils.
Two years after the Sunday Times reported that more than 50% of children who started Grade 1 made it to matric, the paper recently found:
In the Western Cape only 39 302 of the 81 137 pupils in Grade 3 in 1996 are in matric this year;
In Mpumalanga 16 681 pupils dropped out of school this year;
Between 6 000 and 7 000 pupils left schools in KwaZulu-Natal prematurely in 2004;
A total of 150 562 Grade 1 pupils in 2001 and 136 684 in 2002 disappeared from the school system nationally;
In the Eastern Cape 23 000 learners dropped out of Grade 11 in 2003; and
A total of 19 969 dropped out of schools in North West in 2003.
After three weeks of inquiries, Gauteng, Northern Cape and the Free State failed to provide details of dropout or failure rates.
The last available national statistics on the drop-out rate appeared in a document published by the Treasury in 2003. It showed that, on average, for every 100 children in Grade 1 there were 52 in Grade 12.
Salim Vally, senior researcher at the Wits University Education Policy Unit, said research showed poverty was the main reason for leaving school prematurely.
The unit, together with the University of Sussex and Bristol University, will conduct studies in five African countries, including South Africa, to assess the quality of and access to education, including reasons pupils drop out.
Education Director-General Duncan Hindle said the government wanted to establish several non-fee-paying schools within the next two years which could reduce the drop-out rate.
He said Pandor had discovered pupils at a Free State school struggling to pay a fee of just R10 a year.
Lilla du Toit, acting chief director for examination assessment and quality assurance in the Eastern Cape, said pupils also left school after Grade 7 to look for jobs.
" Poverty, especially in the old Transkei, contributes to pupils dropping out. They don't have money for the basics. School is a luxury; you just don't go," she said.
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