According to the Department of Basic Education (DBE), its mission is to ensure that children attend school during the compulsory schooling age, striving to increase the percentage of youth who successfully finish Grade 12.
The department provided several activities and initiatives to achieve the mission, especially to ensure that underprivileged children, such as those who receive child support and foster care grants, have the chance to succeed in school.
Through the initiatives, the department has been able to decrease the number of learners who drop out of school, however, due to Covid-19, there were a few setbacks. South Africa is currently on the same level as other middle-income countries with regard to the number of learners who successfully complete 12 years of schooling.
Over the past few years, the number of orphans and children with disabilities who complete Grade 12 has also increased. STATS-SA’s General Household Surveys (GHS) have shown that from 2018 to 2021 the percentage of orphans who completed Grade 9 increased to 77%.
From 2002 to 2006, only 19% of children with disabilities completed Grade 12. Whereas from 2018 to 2021, an estimated 34% of children with disabilities completed matric.
Since 2010, school attendance rates amongst 7 to 15-year-olds who receive child support grants have hovered around 99%. This proves that the department's interventions have improved the school attendance of these learners.
The department would also like for more young people to further their studies at universities or colleges which is part of the department’s Medium-Target Strategic Framework. This can be done by ensuring that more Grade 12 learners achieve above-mark thresholds in mathematics and physical science.
According to the 2019 General Household Survey, learners between the age of 16 to 18 years drop out of school due to financial challenges at home or not being able to cope with the academic workload.
Some parents and guardians may decide that a child who does not perform well at school is not worth investing in, which should not be the case.
The department’s strategies, aimed at increasing the number of learners who complete Grade 12, are based on international and local evidence and are in line with the policy advice provided by organisations such as UNESCO.
The strategies are multipronged and include special emphasis on dealing with the effects of poverty and improving learning and teaching in the classroom.
Below are the key initiatives which caused the reductions in learner dropout and which will hopefully ensure future improvements in learning:
- National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP): This intervention encourages children to attend school, and promotes learning by reducing levels of hunger and malnutrition, which inhibit successful learning.
- No-fee schools: This longstanding intervention ensures that children and youths in poorer communities are not prevented from attending school due to the inability of the household to pay for school fees.
- Policies on teenage pregnancies: Government Notice 704 of 2021 formalised policy on the protection of the schooling of pregnant learners. Among females aged 16 to 18, around 10% did not attend school due to pregnancy, according to the 2019 GHS.
- Ongoing strengthening of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS): A more focused curriculum is one reason that has been put forward as a reason for past improvements in South Africa’s performance in international testing programmes – see the Department’s Action Plan to 2024.
- Improving learning in the early grades: A key government priority is improving reading, learning and teaching in general, in the early grades. Several interventions contribute towards this, including the shift in the responsibility for pre-schooling from the social development sector to basic education, the Early Grade Reading Study and associated teacher development innovations, and the introduction of the Systemic Evaluation.
- Special examination preparation support for Grade 12 learners: Activities here, aimed largely at ensuring that learners leave school with the NSC, include the so-called winter schools.
- Expansion of the learner-level enrolment and attendance monitoring systems: The Learner Unit Record Information and Tracking System (LURITS), the SA-SAMS school management system and the partnership-driven Data Driven Districts (DDD) initiative have all contributed to a more robust approach to monitoring exactly where in the country dropping out is occurring.
These systems proved invaluable for providing information on, for instance, where children were not returning to school during the pandemic.
