Extract There is an official document doing the rounds that comes from a powerful committee of the department of basic education containing a “proposal to implement automatic promotion in the foundation phase”. Depending on whom one speaks to, the proposal either exists as a discussion document or it can be regarded as fait accompli. Let me be clear: if this policy is implemented, it would be the final nail in the coffin of an already collapsing primary school system.
Think about it. A child fails in Grade 1 and is promoted to Grade 2. The child fails again and is promoted to Grade 3. By the time these promoted children get to Grade 4 there would be large numbers of children who are illiterate and innumerate putting pressure on the system to continue the madness of promotion into the next phase of schooling.
I cannot think of a greater disaster that can be visited on primary schools, where already most of our children (almost 80%) cannot read at the grade level. Why would the government do this to poor children?
The proposal, citing unnamed experts, makes a number of spurious claims. To begin with, the document argues that “it does not make any educational sense to make young children aged six to ten years, to repeat a grade”.
First up, this is nonsense. On the contrary, it makes profound educational sense to promote children on grounds that they have mastered the content of one grade as the basis for success in the subject in the next grade. That is why the school curriculum across much of the world is organised on the simple principle of the spiral curriculum; that is, knowledge from one grade to the next is designed for increasing complexity even as earlier content is reinforced.
It makes profound educational sense to promote children on grounds that they have mastered the content of one grade.
Then there is the equally preposterous claim that “children who repeat, on the whole, gain absolutely nothing”. The official writing this clearly believes teachers are idiots and that no serious educational researcher would read the hyperbolic claim “absolutely nothing”. Children always gain something by repeating a year if the second opportunity systematically addresses knowledge gaps from the first opportunity. That is what the research says.
But the recklessness does not stop there, for the next claim is even more laughable: that “repetition in the early grades is a predictor of school dropouts”. Actually, what predicts dropouts is poor and inconsistent teaching, unsupported learning, dangerous school environments and the pull of gangs and easy money on the outside.
What is going on here? Quite simple. The department officials are acting on a political mandate that ensures undeserved children (that is, black and poor pupils in the main) receive a free pass through the foundation years, thereby avoiding the utter embarrassment to the government that after 25 years it has still failed to fix the apartheid school system. According to its own statistics, 15%-20% of pupils across the country repeat Grade 1. This is costly in social, economic and political terms.
Leading the charge against this political skulduggery is one of SA’s most passionate and articulate opinion-makers on early learning, Nikki Bush. This mother of two and author of Future-proof Your Child and Tech-savvy Parenting had her posts go viral on social media as she attacked this proposal for automatic promotion. She rightly argues that such a policy defies what we know about learning from neuroscience and that perceptual skills and concrete learning are foundations of later success in school and in life.
In other words, rather than promote children who did not grasp basic concepts and skills in the early years, put double the resources into training for teacher competence inside functional schools. Better still, ensure that even before children get to school that some benchmark of school readiness is assured for every child long before they enter Grade 1.
As a new grandparent, I am fascinated again as I watch how engaged parents prepare their children for formal schooling. By the time the child reaches school, she can count to 50, cut with a pair of scissors, read a simple book, identify the colours of the rainbow and find a word for everyday objects from fire engine to fat-free milk. These children do not repeat grades for one simple reason — the quality of their preschool education. Sadly, children who enjoy such structured learning come mainly from middle-class homes, black and white.
This is why we have a government — to ensure fairness. In this context, to provide high-quality preschool education for the children of the poor whose parents have neither the resources, experience nor the expertise to do this for themselves.
But what does this government of ours propose to do? Promote the children who fail in the hope that by some miracle they catch up on all the learning in later grades. What will happen for sure — and our research in the forthcoming book, The Enigma of Inequality in South African Schooling (Nic Spaull and Jonathan Jansen 2019, Springer Press) shows clearly — the gap will continue to increase between the privileged middle classes and the poor.
Every citizen has the solemn responsibility to speak up against this policy proposal for automatic promotion — for the sake of all our children.
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