Teacher unions determined to boycott ANAs
With a little under a month to go before the start of the Annual National Assessments, a number of teachers' unions are standing firm on their decision to boycott the tests, saying they weren't consulted by the Basic Education Department.
The ANAs are a diagnostic tool to assess the literacy and numeracy levels of pupils in grades 1 to 9.
Last year’s ANAs indicated that only 3% of Grade 9 pupils had a good basic knowledge of arithmetics.
While the SA-Democratic Teachers Union feels the department's wasting valuable time by holding the assessments instead of fixing the problem.
NATU's Allen Thompson says the ANAs add no real value in their current form.
"We want a new national assessment but in a different form. So we are not going to allow teachers to administer or learners to write the current Annual National Assessments in its current form," he said.
Naptosa's Bail Manuel says they agree.
"We believe that it is not credible. They claim about that 20% of school are cheating in the ANA. In fact, we're saying it's 20% that they know,"he said.
And SAOU's Chris Klopper has this to say about the ANAs.
"Our problem is that currently the ANAs are written by each and every learner and it doesn't make sense that there is no diagnosis that explains where are the major trends and shortcomings so that we can to train our teachers to focus on those particular shortcomings," he said.
The PEU's Malose Kutumela shares the same sentiments.
"ANAs in this current form is not really helping us. Hence, we had to say to ourselves, we are also not going to engage in writing ANAs from December 1 to December 4," he said.
In a joint statement two months ago, the five teacher unions expressed their disappointment over the department's decision to proceed with the tests this year when they'd agreed that they would be postponed to next year.
(File photo: Gallo Images)