Teachers union: 'National education system needs to be fixed'
Teachers union Naptosa believes one of the major problems in the education sector is the fixation with assessment from a national level.
Executive director Basil Manuel has been speaking at the union’s provincial congress, currently underway in Durban.
Commenting on the declining matric pass rate in the province from 69.7% in 2014 to 60.7% in 2015, Manuel says the focus should be on fixing the entire education system - particularly with regard to teacher support.
"The whole system has to rely on greater teacher support. There is not enough teacher support in the system, there's not enough professional development in the system, and even now I can tell you that there are matric teachers of mathematics that still haven't been trained in certain sections of mathematics that they don't know - like Euclidean geometry. And then you expect them to have mastered that with their children - that's not going to be possible."
Earlier this year, KZN Education MEC Peggy Nkonyeni remained confident that the province would improve the overall matric pass rate by at least 10% in 2016. This, despite a dozen KZN schools having obtained a 0% pass rate in 2015.
The union believes that the country's education system needs to be overhauled, a topic that will be discussed at the congress - which concludes tomorrow.