Honourable Members of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature
Guest Presenters
Managers of Gauteng Department of Education
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
Each year, large numbers of learners leave school without earning a National Senior Certificate. Without that certificate, they'll be more likely to head down a path that leads to unemployment, lower-paying jobs, poorer health, and the possible continuation of a cycle of poverty that creates immense challenges for families and communities.
Over a lifetime, dropouts typically earn less, suffer from poorer health as adults, and are more likely to wind up in jail than their peers with certificates. While there has been some attempt at detailing the economic and social impacts of failing to finish formal schooling, the full impact is yet to be researched.
As a country we have made tremendous gains in reducing dropout rates across all grades and we have seen more and more learners remaining in the education system despite in-school and external pressures that would ordinarily see learners dropping out in large numbers. In less than 18 years, we are clearly emerging from a concentrated crisis of dropout rates and Matric pass rates created over the previous 50 years. This success has also been widely acclaimed in leading international education organisations.
A reflection on enrolment patterns can really assist in understanding the problem of dropouts.
In 2001, in Gauteng, a total of 126 961 entered schooling and only 82 914 managed to reach Grade 12 in 2012, which translate into 65% of the total population of learners who started in 2001. This may mean that 35% of these learners cannot be accounted for in their matric year. This is a major improvement when one considers that only 29% African learners in Gauteng passed Grade 12 in 1994, just a miniscule percentage of those who originally started twelve years before.
Although the number of learners is not stable from one year to the next, enrolment trends also show that between Grade 10 and grade 12 of the same learner cohort, there is a sudden decrease in the numbers of learners from Grade 10 to 12. Looking at the cohort of learners in Grade 10 in 2010 and the cohort in 2012 we can see that just under 40 % of the learners “vanished” from the system within these three years.
Although this is a 15% improvement when compared to cohort of learners who began schooling in 1995 and while we may be performing better than other provinces, there are critical questions that remain to be answered. These include:
- who and where are these learners;
- why are they out of the schooling system?”
- have we managed to keep more African children who started schooling in grade one within the education system? and,
- what proportion of those who remain in school for a full twelve years or more exit the system with a pass that allows them to move on to college or university?
Indeed in recent times similar questions have also attracted a great deal of attention in the public domain and have sparked a debate about missing numbers and poor quality education. However, this debate failed to establish a common understanding of the problem, let alone a common description or definition of the phenomenon of Dropouts. The real concern facing all of us is that while some learners drop out because of significant academic challenges, most dropouts are learners who could have, and believe they could have, succeeded in school.
Today, failure in school and why learners drop out of school is too complex and has many curricular and non-curricular in its explanation. For some learners, dropping out is the culmination of years of academic hurdles, missteps, and wrong turns. For others, the decision to drop out is a response to conflicting life pressures the need to help support their family financially or the demands of caring for siblings or their own child. Dropping out is sometimes about learners being bored and seeing no connection between academic life and "real" life. It's about young people feeling disconnected from their peers and from teachers and other adults at school. And it's about schools and communities having too few resources to meet the complex emotional and academic needs of their most vulnerable youth.
Although the reasons for dropping out vary, the consequences of the decision are remarkably similar. The fact of the matter is that if these learners are not at school, they add to a group of unskilled and semi skilled workforce which is already in surplus. This is a group of youth which is vulnerable and in some cases involved in criminal activities in desperation for survival.
A holistic approach is important for both a theoretical understanding of the problem, as well as, more effective delivery of services to this population of “drop-outs”. The inability of key role-players to arrive at common understanding of the nature, diagnosis and impact of dropouts of the has the potential to result in adding to the socio-economic challenges we already experience as a country. The level of dropouts and poor quality of learner achievement is impacting negatively on the economic growth of the country and sustainable job creation. Therefore, it should be eminently clear that dealing with dropouts is everyone's problem and should not be relegated to an overly simplistic, “the system is failing the learner” or the counter "it is their fault if they fail in school”.
Our understanding Drop-Outs must be expanded and refined
Understanding this population of “dropouts” is a complex and difficult task to achieve because of our diverse understanding of the phenomenon. While the most general term used is probably learners-at-risk or youth-at-risk. We know that this fails to bring us closer to understanding them and addressing their needs.
We are dealing with diverse range of learners who are either dropping out of school or remaining in school for years without completing.
There are two groups of learners that drop out of school completely. The first group are learners who are low achievers who have experienced continued failure through most of their time in school. They are increasing referred to as Quiet dropouts because their reaction to failure is not overt or attention gaining. Another term that emerges often for this group is pushout and is defined more generally as curriculum casualties. These are learners who are forced to adapt to the curriculum rather than having the curriculum modified to meet their needs. The second group are learners that drop out of school are for Non-Curricular reasons. The causes of the problems of this group reside outside of school. There may be problems of abuse, alcohol, drugs, poverty, health, and myriad others as to why the child doesn't learn and becomes truant and eventually quits school. The child cannot learn if he/she comes to school tired, hungry, and afraid.
Similarly, we find that there are two broad grouping of learners who remain in school but have dropped out of learning. The first group are low achievers who have experienced continued failure, but are unlike quiet dropouts they react to failure in disruptive and annoying ways. The second group, are referred to as Persisters. They are learners who have poor performance, but have the goal of completing school or who have compensatory behaviours to continue to attend school. These compensatory behaviours could include sports, art, or cheating. Some from this group may actually complete after a number of attempts at the school leaving exams.
Despite the problems at arriving a definition of dropout, what we can conclude from the work done by researchers, locally and internationally, is that:
- Dropouts are not a homogeneous group. Many subgroups of learners can be identified based on what risk factors emerge, the combinations of risk factors experienced, and how the factors influence them;
- Dropping out is often a process, not an event, with factors building and compounding over time; and
- Dropping out of school is often the result of a long process of disengagement that may begin before a child enters school.
At-risk, dropout, and pushout are all different, but this difficulty of understanding who this population of dropouts are, should only make us work harder at defining the problem and beginning design and implement the right interventions.
Key challenges to addressing the Problem
We seriously need to address this problem of dropouts whichever way it manifests across the schooling system. Most current Dropout-prevention strategies vary widely and most are directed at forcing learners to remain in school despite the fact that the school is not responsive to the need to these learners. We must emerge rapidly with a better understanding of the root causes of Drop-Outs, identify strategies and interventions, change policy where needed and improve on monitoring learners-at risk. The following remain our key challenges:
Firstly, we need to identify Preventative Programmes as prevention begins in part by identifying struggling learners early and targeting them for assistance. Building a predictability model for schools and teachers to use to identify learners is critical to intervening early. We need to arm teachers and school managers, and by extension parents, with early warning systems to identify if a child is going to drop-out. These early warning systems must be based on historical data for dropouts, including: attendance, subject achievement, behaviour, and age.
One such model is based on diagnosing Infrequent attendance, behaviour infractions, and course failure—the “ABC’s” of dropout. This model, it is claimed, can more accurately predict whether a learner will drop out of high school than do socio-economic factors and can be used to predict high school completion as early as the start of the senior phase of schooling.
Secondly, we must clarify, define and emphasise multiple pathways to completing formal schooling for Dropouts. Over the last decade, we have, by default, expanded alternative education possibilities for learner who dropped out of school in ABET centres. We need to accelerate our programmes to institutionalise technical and vocational education across our technical high schools and FET colleges. We must offer career-focused curricula, team teaching, and involvement from the business community.
Thirdly, we must expand inclusive education by creating more personalised learning environments for learners; providing extra support and academic enrichment for struggling learners; providing psycho-social services to learners deemed to be at risk of dropping out; and providing rigorous and relevant teaching to engage learners in learning.
Finally, more research should be conducted in carefully tailored areas that are more “policy-relevant” to addressing the problem in a realistic fashion. We need to know how, if at all, might relevant policies and programmes be changed so as to induce more young people who are at risk of dropping out to complete formal schooling? If some similarly situated learners can do it, why not all?
The Colloquium
While the Department is making progress in interventions in the some above areas, there are still a significant number of learners who still get lost in the system. We are concerned that the learners who drop-out or those who remain in school but don't get a chance to perform well face unemployment and poverty.
We have convened this colloquium to engage with the research undertaken to investigate the nature and incidence of learner dropout and the reasons why learners drop out. I hope that this colloquium, which brings forward the significant perspectives of researchers in this field, creates a platform for a provincial conversation between policymakers, researchers, stakeholders and senior departmental officials who are all struggling with high dropout rates and open a discussion to arrive at a common understanding of the problem and identify innovative solutions that should be undertaken. This massive challenge requires a comprehensive societal commitment, response and action to successfully reduce dropouts and the impact of drop-outs.
Concluding Remarks
I hope that the reflections, analysis and discussion shared in this colloquium will help transform how we view these young people – not as problems to be solved, but as potential to be fulfilled.
I would like to wish the speakers and all the participants well in their deliberation.
Thank you.
