31 Jan 2017

Palapye Sub-region junior secondary schools failed to meet the Junior Certificate Examinations (JCE) target.

The sub-region scored an overall performance of 36.70 per cent with the highest school Gosemama JSS scoring 51.72 per cent.

Palapye Sub-region chief education officer, Mr Otukile Kedikilwe said in an interview that the set target was 60 per cent even though none of the 12 schools met the target.

Mr Kedikilwe said the best four schools in the 2016 JCE in the sub-region were Gosemama with 51.72 per cent, Mmaphula with 50 per cent, Mabogo with 42.71 per cent and Bakgopeng with 40 per cent.

He said three schools, Mmachibaba, Lerala and Mokgalo performed below the red line with all of them scoring below 30 per cent.

Even though Mokgalo JSS got the last position even last year, Mr Kedikilwe said it made a slight improvement from 19.7 per cent in 2015 to 26.6 per cent this year.

He said the sub-region came up with a handholding initiative to help schools that performed below 30 per cent and the results proved to bring positive results for Mokgalo JSS.

He said the sub-region management sat down with the management of struggling schools and identified their problems and came up with strategies to overcome those challenges.

However, he said a school like Lerala continued to drop in performance despite this intervention.

He also identified a positive improvement in the number of As, registering 15 As compared to last year’s 11As. Nonetheless, he said the number of students who attained B grade declined from 219 in 2015 to 184 in 2016, adding that the AB category had dropped.

He said it was worrying that academic results were continuing to decline despite the efforts put by teachers and other stakeholders to improve performance.

Also, he said it was a concern that students perform outstandingly at PSLE and drop at JC level, adding that the sub-region was yet to find out the cause.

Regarding PSLE, he said the sub-region did well with an average performance of 74.4 per cent for 37 primary schools. ENDS