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Indians to help S Africa improve school education
Indian educationists will be roped in by the South African Government to help stem declining results in matriculation examinations.
Indian educationists will be roped in by the South African government to help stem declining results in matriculation examinations amid public concerns about the quality of education in the country.
Duncan Hindle, director general of the national education ministry, said the assistance of Indian educational experts would be sought after the matric results of the nine provinces in South Africa were analysed.
All but one province showed a decline in the pass rate this year. Education Minister Naledi Pandor said a district support and quality improvement unit from India would study results of 79 districts.
As provincial education ministers hosted functions this week to announce the matric results and top achievers, many angrily hit out at private and government schools that had low pass rates, some not even having a single student passing out.
Some ministers threatened to deregister non-performing private schools run by NGOs or religious organisations.
Angry parents have demanded results for the huge fees they often paid for supposedly personal attention in private institutions for their children, as they avoided sending them to crowded government schools.
But there were also success stories amid the gloom. South African Indian students dominated the list of top students in KwaZulu-Natal province, home to more than two-thirds of the country's descendants from Indian sugarcane farm labourers.
Muhammad Ali Rahman, 18, of Rand Afrikaans University College of Learning and Leadership in Johannesburg - where he was accepted for high school studies after passing tough aptitude tests in mathematics and science - got distinctions in all eight subjects that he sat for.
Almost all private schools run by the South African Indian community across Gauteng province featured prominently in the top-performing schools.
These schools were established after concern was expressed about the quality of education at government schools.
The new democracy initiated plans a decade ago, as provision had to be made suddenly for hundreds of thousands of African pupils denied formal schooling under apartheid.
