Non-viable schools closures 'too slow'

Only a quarter of the close to 2000 unviable schools blamed for the Eastern Cape’s poor matric performance last year have been closed.

Premier Phumulo Masualle last year demanded answers from authorities on how the department planned to deal with the unviable schools, which had contributed to the poor matric results last year.

Education MEC Mandla Makupula said yesterday at a media briefing held at the Stirling Education Institute offices in East London that 502 of the schools were published in the Government Gazette for closure. He was announcing the province’s state of readiness for this year’s matric exams and the process of verifying identity documents of pupils.

“There is progress in closing schools but not at a pace we would love to be. There are some challenges. I issued a notice to say their performance was declining and must give reasons why their schools should not be closed.”

Makupula said he had received no negative feedback that could stall the process of closing the schools 30 days after issuing the gazette.

He said the schools were closed because they were already “operationally non-functional”.

This year, 94928 full-time registered pupils will sit for exams while last year a total of 91810 registered. A total of 14272 progressed pupils have also registered for exams.

The province will have 872 centres where exams will be held, 46 independent centres, three full-time correctional centres, one part-time correctional centre and 116 part-time public centre. A provincial monitoring plan is being prepared for centres that will administer matric exams for the first time, centres with a history of irregularities from 2014, independent centres and high-risk centres.

It was revealed that the class of 2016 had dropped its pass rate in the mid-year exams from last year’s 51% to 44.9%.

Makupula said despite the poor performance, a higher number of pupils had chosen maths, which was a positive for the province.

In addition, Makupula said his department had spearheaded an initiative to verify the IDs of pupils, a move which he claimed was the first of its kind in the country.

The initiative, which came into effect in March, is to form the basis for resourcing schools next year.

The auditor-general had stated that the continued allocation of resources based on invalid IDs amounted to fruitless and wasteful expenditure.

Schools were still allocated funding per pupil for the nutrition programme, but would only be funded for other resources once a verified identity document could be produced, even if it meant a school would be paid their allocation retrospectively. “It is expected that these anomalies are existing on a national basis and the Eastern Cape has taken the lead in dealing with it, now providing a basis for other provinces to roll out similar projects,” said Makupula.

Yesterday, the Dispatch reported on how the department had addressed the crisis and improved the number of pupils who had IDs by more than 50%, including correcting those with errors on them.

Makupula said pupils without IDs had decreased from 460070 to 72436. — msindisif@dispatch.co.za/ mbalit@dispatch.co.za