More than half of the heads of SA’s high school maths and science departments have no suitable qualifications in these subjects, with most having majored in subjects such as history and geography, a senior department of basic education official has told parliament.
This comes at a time when universities are struggling to find enough matriculants able to graduate with the science, technology, engineering and maths skills that SA’s economy desperately needs.
The dearth of subject skills among departmental heads and the teachers they oversee has been cited by the department as one of the key causes.
The department’s director for teacher development implementation, Philip Dikgomo, told parliament last week that 43.3% of maths and science heads of department in secondary schools are equipped to offer appropriate support to teachers, according to a study the department conducted in 2018.
He said the insufficient number of teachers qualified to teach maths, science and technical subjects was one of the main causes of underperformance in maths and science by SA’s education system.
Others were the uneven and inadequate number of subject advisers in these subjects and the low number of appropriately qualified departmental heads in secondary schools.
“In 2018 we undertook a study in eight districts, where we looked into maths and science departmental heads and from that sample we realised that 43.3% of the departmental heads are appropriate to overseeing and guiding teachers who teach maths and science,” Dikgomo told legislators.
“The others are largely somebody who majored in history or geography but is overseeing or babysitting maths and science as it were. This is one area calling for our attention,” he said.
The lack of qualified departmental heads was worsened by teachers who had not majored in the key subjects.
“Most of those who teach mathematics did not major in the subject at higher levels. This year we will be doing an audit of the maths teachers and find out what they studied and what actually happens in the classrooms as they teach maths.”
The huge increase in the number of pupils opting to study maths literacy rather than maths has also been challenging for the department, which is battling a shortage of teachers trained to teach the subject.
The National Development Plan (NDP) foresees lifting the number of university science and maths entrants to 450,000 by 2030, but department of basic education director-general Hubert Mweli said that while participation and success rates in maths and science had improved, the department would fall well short of meeting NDP targets.
“But the targets of the NDP were set without taking into context technical maths and technical science, because at that time the conceptualisation of those two did not feature.”
Seliki Tlhabane, chief director for mathematics, science and technology and curriculum enhancement programmes, said training at university level was falling short of what used to be offered by defunct colleges of education. The result was that though teachers were qualified, they required support to orientate them to their work.
SA will this year present its cohort of grade 9 pupils for assessment by Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an international body that assesses the performance of grade 4 and 8 pupils around the world.
TIMSS is conducted every four years. While other countries present their grade 8 pupils, SA presents grade 9s. However, this has not aided SA’s performance. In the grade 8 TIMSS 2019, only four in 10 SA pupils demonstrated they had acquired basic maths and science knowledge.
Performance
“Internationally, it is grade 8s who participate in TIMSS, but in SA we present our grade 9s. When we say other countries are performing better than us, we are actually saying their grades 8 are performing better than our grade 9s, which is concerning,” Tlhabane said.
“It means there is a lot of work we have to do.”
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