Don’t just blame teachers for failure NASA

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RUNDU – The National Association of African Students has said it disagrees that teachers should be blamed for recent devastating National Senior Secondary Certificate Ordinary and Advanced Subsidiary exam results.

The results show that 38,019 learners presented at the NSSCO level but only 5,812 learners (15.3%) met the requirements to enroll in tertiary institutions while the remaining 32,207 (84.7%) are sent to the streets. It is reported that around 420 learners scored zero in the second math test.

The association believes that the management of the school was a contributing factor.

Many public schools are experiencing leadership and management crises, which negatively affect performance. We have raised concerns about incompetent principals, department heads and teachers who are unable to gradually manage school affairs, NASA President Paulus Vihemba said on Friday.

The promotion criteria used were also described as unfair and allegedly played a role in the failure of learners. For example: a learner who scored 19 points in grade 11 with B, C, C, E, U, U qualifies to advance to grade 12, but a learner who scored 32 points in grade 11 with the following symbols A, B, C, C, C, D were not qualified to go to 12th grade, he said.

NASA, in a statement, noted that the new curriculum is also not understood by many teachers as it has just been introduced without proper training given to teachers to adjust their teaching and assessment standards as l ‘requires the new program.

Teaching and learning materials for the new curriculum are also not sufficiently available, Vihemba said.

We recognize that teachers are the implementers of the curriculum and they prepare learners for the exam, but we cannot blame teachers for learners’ failure as the education system is encroached with many problems which have made it impossible teacher delivery, he said.

Vihemba said the results are disappointing and put the country’s education system in crisis.

This means the overall performance can be rated U (15.3%) this is indeed a crisis we find ourselves in so as an association we are not interested in the blame game so we We took the time to objectively assess the results and analyze the combination of factors that also contributed to the learners’ failure, he noted.

Vihemba further stated that NASA, in its observation, found that this failure was due to a lack of commitment or minimal effort from stakeholders and a flood of contributing factors:

The inability of the Cabinet to allocate adequate funding to basic education and the inability of the Ministry to mobilize additional funds to implement free education, which has led to many crises that have had a negative impact on learning and teaching, such as insufficient learning infrastructure, delay in payment of UPR/USE grants, a shortage of teaching and learning materials in our public schools , thus creating several problems among others, he said.

Vihemba said the ministry had not recruited enough teachers for understaffed schools as required by the teacher-learner ratio policy, which suggests 30 learners per secondary school teacher. Now, classes have up to 45 learners.

The delay in appointing new teachers has resulted in an overload of teachers and left the school management with no choice but to assign tasks to teachers who are not professionally trained to teach certain subjects, he said. he noted.

Vihemba also alleged that the ministry’s promotional policy, which allows the transfer of learners from one year to another, even when they perform poorly, citing the waste of resources when learners repeat a year, also contributes to the current failure, among others.

The student body further called on the government to prioritize education funding, increasing the basic education budget from N$14.1 billion to at least N$20 billion to effectively manage education.

This would mean that teaching and learning materials will be made available to enable effective teaching and learning. We recommend that leadership positions such as Principals and Heads of Department be appointed on five-year contracts, just like higher education institutions, and that contracts be renewed only on the basis of satisfaction set performance indicators, he said.

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2023-01-10 John Muyamba

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