Education: Survey underlines poor state of school system

School safety incidents occurred more frequently in SA than in any other country participating in the 2018 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) teaching and learning survey. This is according to a summary of SA’s survey results, which the Department of Basic Education released yesterday, reports Pam Saxby for Legalbrief Policy Watch.  Just over a third of participating principals reported ‘at least weekly’ acts of intimidation or bullying among their students – more than double the OECD average. Approximately one in four principals reported weekly incidents of vandalism, theft and the use/possession of drugs and/or alcohol – behaviour comparatively rare on school grounds in other OECD countries. However, it should be borne in mind that, according to SAnews, SA was the only African country to participate in the survey.

During the period reviewed, the capacity of SA schools to provide quality teaching was hampered by ‘significant’ shortages not only of library material and equipment for digital instruction but also by inadequate physical infrastructure and a shortage of support personnel – challenges far less frequently encountered by educators in the other OECD countries surveyed. Most South African survey participants worked in schools with considerably higher numbers of students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds than the OECD average. According to the survey, SA also had ‘the highest share’ of educators working in classroom situations with large numbers of learners whose home language differed from the language of instruction.

While teaching was found to be the career of first choice for considerably fewer South African educators surveyed than in other participating OECD countries, it was rated as the profession offering the ‘steadiest’ career path by a far higher number of teachers than elsewhere. Typically, although South African teachers have higher ‘educational attainment’ levels than ‘the general adult population’, they were found to be lower than in any other participating OECD country. One in four educators in SA ‘has not completed’ a tertiary education course. At the time of writing, the department had yet to issue a media statement on the results.

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