WE WON’T ALLOW GOVT TO EXPLOIT US – SNAT

MBABANE – SNAT says it will not allow its members to teach the 2 716 Grade VII pupils who failed despite government saying they will repeat.
Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) President, Mbongwa Dlamini said government has to employ teachers to specifically teach the pupils who did not make it in Grade VII. He said there was no way that they could be put together with the coming class of pupils. The year 2024 served as the last year for the Outcome-Based Education (OBE) curriculum and the group of learners in Grade VII will be under the Competency-Based Education (CBE). The introduction of CBE means the phasing out of OBE and Dlamini said SNAT won’t allow government to exploit its members by making them teach the OBE pupils who failed.

Class

Minister for Education and Training Owen Nxumalo told Eswatini News that the pupils who failed Grade VII will repeat the grade and they will not be promoted to the next class.
However, Dlamini said it was impossible for the pupils to repeat because they had missed six years of the new curriculum, which will be rolled out in Grade VII, this academic year.
Dlamini stated that if anything, government should employ teachers who will be tasked with teaching the affected pupils under the OBE curriculum because there is no way they can repeat under the new curriculum.

“Government’s failure to have a proper plan on this should not be a burden to our members. We will not allow them to be exploited. All these years, the pupils have been pushed to the next class and government should maintain that position even now and if they can’t, they should employ teachers specifically for teaching these pupils,” he said. Dlamini said if government is adamant that the pupils should repeat, then the question becomes: Is the Examination Council of Eswatini ready to serve two sets of exams for the 2025 Grade VII pupils?
“If government maintains its position on the matter, then government should be ready to roll-out two sets of examinations, one for the CBE and the other for the OBE,” he said.

Dlamini further revealed that this was not a decision to be made by government in isolation, but it was supposed to be a consensus of all relevant stakeholders, including the teachers. He said government did not conduct any consultations on the way forward as far as the situation is concerned, but they took their position unilaterally. “The only time we engaged on the matter was with the acting principal secretary in the ministry, where we stated that making the pupils repeat was not possible, given that they had missed six years of the new curriculum and playing catch-up in one year was not possible,” he said.

Fail

Dlamini also opined that the reason there were huge numbers of failures and a low pass rate in many years, was because the pupils had been pushed to the next class since the CBE was introduced six years ago. In the past five years, there has been an upward trend in the number of failures in Grade VII, from just 1 638 in 2020 to 2 295 in 2023 and the latest 2 716 in 2024. The alarming 2 716 fail were announced by the Minister for Education and Training, Owen Nxumalo, when delivering the Eswatini Primary Certificate (EPC) examination results over a week ago in a press conference, convened at the ministry’s boardroom.

The 2024 EPC results were the worst in the previous five years with a pass rate of 90.75 per cent. Meanwhile, 29 635 candidates sat the EPC examination with 1 043 candidates attaining Merits. The number of First Class passes was 3 547, Second Class passes 15 085 and Third Class passes was 7 088. Nxumalo mentioned in his press conference, that 2024 served as the second year of a normalised school calendar post the novel COVID-19 and the political unrest, which were being felt in the learning setting. According to Nxumalo, the EPC results, along with those of the Junior Certificate (JC), experienced severe drawbacks in their earlier learning years.

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