DA welcomes decision to test examiners; urges adoption of successful literacy initiatives as well
The Democratic Alliance (DA) notes that Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga will follow the example of the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) and test proposed examiners across the nation for their academic competence to mark National Senior Certificate (NSC) scripts. Recently, the DA successfully introduced in the Western Cape requirements and criteria for NSC markers to ensure that all markers are both competent and experienced in their subject fields, and able to achieve a high standard of marking in the NSC examinations. The Western Cape Education Department went ahead with competency testing in July, despite the efforts of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) to boycott it.
Minister Motshekga said in response to a parliamentary question that the Council of Education Ministers approved the policy in March 2011, but that the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC) is still working hard to obtain the agreement of all stakeholders. The idea is to implement competency tests for markers in all the provincial departments of education in 2012. The tests will assess the subject knowledge, assessment skills and language proficiency of the prospective markers, with the aim of improving the quality and standard of marking.
We urge Minister Motshekga to continue championing this initiative. It is of the utmost importance that the individuals who mark matric scripts have the knowledge and ability to judge learners' performance accurately and give a fair assessment of their efforts.
We also wish to encourage the Minister to recommend that the other provinces adopt some of the initiatives currently being implemented in the Western Cape to improve literacy performance in schools. The release of the Annual National Assessment (ANA) results earlier this year revealed that the Western Cape leads the other provinces in literacy performance.
Tomorrow will be International Literacy Day, and we would like to highlight some of the initiatives undertaken by the WCED that have increased the literacy performance of learners across the province.
These initiatives include yearly systemic testing of Grade 3 and 6 learners in literacy and numeracy performance. Such testing informs the province's literacy and numeracy strategy and effectively reveals which schools are in urgent need of remedial action. This has allowed the Western Cape to provide immediate support to those schools and, as a result, has improved learner outcomes in both literacy and numeracy in the province. The Western Cape Government continues to lead the rest of the country in the use of this extensive testing for learners, being the only province to test its learners systemically, and including Grade 9 learners in its testing for the first time last year.
Another key initiative is building text-rich classrooms. Here, the WCED has invested about R133 million this year in texts of various kinds, in addition to the workbooks distributed nationally. They have also made an unprecedented commitment to ensure that, over the next three years, every child from Grades 1-12 will have a textbook in every subject that he or she is taking.
It is our hope that Minister Motshekga will recommend the implementation of some of these strategies in the other provinces, as she has the testing of examiners, in order to improve literacy performance across SA.
Statement issued by Dr. Wilmot James MP, DA Shadow Minister of Basic Education, September 6 2011
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