OBE on the way out
Posted by Ingrid Thomson | 7 Jul, 2010Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga announced plans to phase out OBE and replace it with "Schooling 2025".
Some snippets from her media announcement:-
* We have reduced the number of projects for learners and have done away with the need for portfolio files of learner assessments. We have also discontinued the common tasks for assessment (CTAs) for grade nine learners with effect from January 2010. Provinces have already informed their schools about the form of assessment that will replace CTAs in 2010.
* The new curriculum and assessment policy statements will repackage the existing curriculum into the general aims of the South African curriculum, the specific aims of each subject, clearly delineated topics to be covered per term and the required number and type of assessments, also per term.
* From 2011, learning areas and programmes will be called subjects across the curriculum from grade R to 12 .... reduce the number of learning areas in the intermediate phase from eight to six. That means that in grades four to six, technology will be combined with science; arts and culture will be combined with life orientation and economic and management sciences will be taught only from grade seven.
* We will start phasing in the curriculum and assessment policy statements in the foundation phase in 2011. We will phase in other grades in 2012 so that we can make the necessary preparations.
* has developed a plan for the development of the work books for grades one to six in order to ensure the development, piloting, printing and distribution of learner workbooks early in 2011.
* from 2011, the language chosen by the learner as a language of learning and teaching shall be taught as a subject, or as a first additional language, from grade one and not from grade two, as is currently the case.BuaNews Online reports on the new curriculum and the workbooks to be rolled out to 20 000 schools.
Here's a link to the response from the Western Cape MEC for Education, Donald Grant.
And links to online newspaper coverage of the move thus far:-
TimesLive reports that the new system recognises that the most South African children have no access to the Internet or to well-stocked libraries.
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Reluctant to call OBE an abject failure, Motshekga conceded that, though the system was launched "with the best of intentions", it had major flaws, including:
- A weak and superficial curriculum that was "unrealistic" and lacking in "specific objectives";
- The assumption that pupils had access to research facilities such as telephones, the Internet, libraries and newspapers; and
- It being open to a wide variety of interpretations, and teachers had no clarity about what was required of them.
Elsewhere in the paper, is a report on the response from Graeme Bloch who welcomed the proposed Schooling 2025 system but issued a warning: "The minister can announce until she's blue in the face in Pretoria, but the provinces have to deliver."
IOL reports on the changes to the system and on the response from the unions.