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Poor Ordinary Level results: Wake-up call
Child Advocacy Solidarity Trust
April 10, 2013

http://eu.financialgazette.co.zw/readers-forum/16143-poor-ordinary-level-results-wake-up-call-.html

We laughed our lungs out briefly, when we learnt that some of our ‘learned’ teachers had been outperformed by pupils after attempting the same grade six mock examination papers.

This was revealed by the permanent secretary for Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, Constance Chigwabha, while giving oral evidence to the Committee for Education.

The November 2012 Ordinary Level results showed a decline from 19,5 percent to 18,4 percent with regards to the previous year and we have all the faith to believe they are the worst since the inception of ZIMSEC in 2000 and before independence when students sat for Cambridge.

A total of 172 698 students sat for the examinations but a measly 31 767 managed to pass with five subjects and above.

As Child Advocacy Solidarity Trust (CAST) some of the factors that we managed to identify as the major contributors to the high failure rate include, but are not limited to, lack of textbooks in classrooms, lack of teacher aids and morale due to meager salaries, mushrooming of illegal private schools with unqualified personnel, colleges recruiting unqualified trainees who have failed either in Mathematics, English or Science which are the essential subjects, government basing on speculation rather than facts and the automatic promotion of pupils and students from grade one to form four.

Recommendations from the 1999 Nziramasanga Commission on education were never implemented.

One of the recommendations was a nine-year compulsory basic education cycle to cultivate the habits, attitudes, interests, skills and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Recently, government put to the test teachers’ temperaments by awarding them a paltry 5,3 percent inflation related salary increment.

CAST recommends that government should set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the problems within the education sector and demands that government should monitor trainees being recruited by colleges, the immediate closure of all illegal private schools and to improve the remuneration and conditions of service for teachers.

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