21 Feb 2016

The multi-grade education seeks to increase accessibility for the disadvantaged children.

Addressing stakeholders at the multi-grade education instructional manual and curriculum launch in Gaborone recently, Assistant Minister of Education and Skills Development, Mr Moiseraele Goya, said the system would promote quality learning experiences and improve transition as well as completion rates for students living in marginalised settlements.

“In multi-grade education, learners of different grades or standards are placed in the same class and taught content that runs across standards,” he said.

He said in enhancing learning as low as primary schools with the development of multi-grade teaching materials, they hoped to achieve improved quality education.

The assistant minister also explained that government, through the education ministry endeavoured to provide 100 per cent free quality education to all children of school going age.

He added that through multi-grade teaching, they hoped the system would go on to ensuring that learners living in adversity peculiar circumstances were catered for with the minimum inconvenience to learners and teachers.
Furthermore, he said in Botswana there were young children who were living in settlements and farms. They walked long distances to areas where there were schools.

As such, he said because Botswana subscribed to international education protocols and in order to commit to the same, they introduced the multi-grade teaching materials to provide aid to teachers in the multi-grade and satellite schools.
He also explained that with the launch of the noble documents, benefits would only be realised through concerted efforts from education authorities.

“Inspectors, curriculum developers, teachers trainers be proactive in seeing to it that these materials are well taken care of and put to best use and should not accumulate dust in the school heads offices,” advised Minister Goya.
On one hand, department of curriculum development and evaluation chief executive officer, Mr Molaodi Menyatso said there were more positive results to reap from the system.

Mr Menyatso said the system was also cost effective because it would allow one teacher to teach two classes at the same time.
He said communities would have a hand to provide facilities, because what it was needed was only a single teacher.

“The idea is to increase access, it is based on the principle of education as a basic right,” he said.
Again, he said the system was made to help children who traveled long distance to school to have an alternative that would allow students to travel short distances.

That, he said would help disadvantaged communities not to send their young children to boarding schools but keep them home since the system did not need any permanent structures to serve as classrooms.
However, he noted that it would require provision temporary shelters to serve as classrooms, and also provide the teacher with shelter and that can be made possible by the community.

Further, he explained that the only thing important was to provide a qualified teacher and required resources.
“We have communities who do not qualify to be recognised settlement with virtue of their number since government has a threshold of a population and if not reached there will not be any developments provided,” he explained.

Thus, he said the system came as an alternative because they had to provide education as a recognised human right.
He also explained that instead of waiting for the settlement to reach the threshold, the system enabled them to provide the resources.

Also, he said the idea was to effectively provide education to the disadvantaged communities, adding the other good thing was that the multi-grade would also help students to help each other.
Mr Menyatso further said because two different levels of standards would be attending to one class, those who were of high level would help the lower ones to keep up hence reaping good results.

He said due to shortage of teachers, the system would also help in that regard, though teachers were still to accustom themselves with it.
Further, he noted that so far some schools that had been using the system had shown positive response, particularly that they had guidelines. Ends