EDITORIAL | A call to action to prioritise building schools in poor and rural areas

At the start of each academic year, the conversation tends to centre on matric pass rates with the release of grade 12 final exam results. It sets the tone for discussions and influences the department of education’s strategy for the new year. The Eastern Cape fell short of its target of an 87% pass for the class of 2025, achieving only 84.17%.

This was slightly down from the previous year’s 84.98%. With the Eastern Cape ranking the lowest of all provinces, officials had to go back to the drawing board, identify the challenges and devise a plan of intervention. The barriers, however, differ from school to school.

A day in the life of a grade 12 pupil at Lukhozi High School in Debenek near Qonce looks very different to that of a child at a better resourced school, yet both will write the same final exam come October. At Lukhozi, pupils talk of not having enough textbooks and being taught in classrooms that leak on rainy days. Walls have huge cracks, windows are broken and writing on the blackboard in one classroom is a safety hazard because of the gaping holes in the floor.

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With only seven classrooms for 280 pupils, pupils lose at least two hours of valuable teaching time every day because there aren’t enough classrooms for all the subjects on offer. When learning begins for one group, another waits outside under the tree for their turn. For years, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has been lauded as an opportunity to catapult schools into the digital future.

However, at this 50-year-old school in Ezihlahleni village, children do not even know how to use a computer. “The department expects a high pass rate, and yet we are subjected to these infrastructural challenges,” a grade 12 pupil told the Dispatch. Storm damage to the building in 2022 is finally being addressed by the department with the delivery of four prefab classrooms and disaster repairs valued at nearly R3m. But the intervention, four years later, is only a stopgap measure.

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