ZEP Education Revisited

Opinion

The objective of achieving zero failure should guide our decisions. Planning must begin immediately, particularly regarding teacher training and recruitment

By Sada Reddi

What happens, one can legitimately ask, when equity in education, particularly in primary education, is constantly deferred? Every year for the last fifty years, many children, after six or seven years of primary schooling, fail to attain the required standard of literacy and numeracy. As one ex-minister once reminded me some years ago, this means about ten thousand pupils without basic educational tools were being thrown into society, and in ten years this amounted to 100,000 pupils with all the consequences that this entailed. The situation is no different today. Fortunately, many of these pupils were able to catch up, make good use of their skills and aptitudes, and limit the initial drawbacks, leading a productive and meaningful life. Nonetheless, one cannot overlook the depressing annual statistics reminding us that among the unemployed, a high proportion are from those who have not successfully completed their primary education.

At present, with a new government and a new, proactive minister of education, there is consensus that it is high time to implement a zero-failure educational system. This is a very tall order for a new government, especially after the messy legacy left at all levels of our education system by a dogmatic, and self-opinionated minister. So far, despite some murmurs of impatience here and there, there is some satisfaction in the hope that the new minister means business. The few changes demanded by many before the election have since been implemented, pending a major conference on education in April.

The minister, who is all for dialogue with the numerous stakeholders, has placed the welfare of the child at the core of the education agenda. The national conference on education is expected to provide a blueprint that is implementable in the future. Some of the changes expected concern decentralization, more autonomy to rectors and head teachers, redesigning the curriculum to suit local conditions, redesigning textbooks to provide for home learning, and proper training courses for teachers. While all these issues and many more are important and will occupy the attention of the minister and all stakeholders, in my view, the basic and perennial problem at pre-primary and lower primary levels should trump all other issues and require the utmost attention of the Ministry to realize a ‘zero failure’ policy.

As said earlier, it is not going to be an easy task for the minister to deliver, given the inherited bureaucratic structure, but it is not impossible as the minister is deeply committed to completing his mission and will muster all the human and other resources to eliminate this wastage and inefficiency in primary education. The country cannot allow 30% of our pupils to leave primary schools without being equipped with the basic tools of numeracy and literacy, given that all our pupils are educable.

Learning deficits

A recent UNESCO report by an officer of the Ministry of Education, published in 2024, highlights some of the challenges. For example, in a data set of 7,597 grade 3 pupils in 2019, there was a response rate of 69 percent. In the domain of literacy, while 92 percent could distinguish phonemes, only 57 percent could retrieve information. What was not known was whether remedial education had been implemented to address the deficits in learning. Since the examination results at the end of primary education did not show any major progress in subsequent years, this suggests that remedial education, even if implemented, had not yielded the expected results.Read More… Become a Subscriber

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 17 January 2025