15 Feb 2017

Selolwe Hill Junior Secondary School head, Ms Bonani Topollo has pleaded with parents and the community to contribute to their children’s education for the betterment of their results.
Ms Topollo was speaking at a recent Parents and Teachers Association (PTA) meeting where teachers and parents exchanged ideas on how to build a result oriented student community.
She expressed dissatisfaction over the performance of her school in the 2015 Junior Certificate (JC) results and the current students’ performance as this put the school in a bad light.
Presenting the northern region 2015 JC results in which her school sat at position 14 out of 17 junior schools in the region, Ms Topollo said her school failed ‘miserably.’
She therefore called upon parents to monitor the performance of their children and act jointly with the teachers so as to shape their education.
“The other thing that worries me is that nowadays students have become nomads due to the tendency of parents’ practice of transferring students from one school to another,” she said.
That, she said was due to their misconception following the release of the academic results that schools that had performed well had the best education, adding such could also affect one’s performance.
Deputy school head, Ms Chedu Seeletso said failure was a result of scarce textbooks due to carelessness of students.
Ms Seeletso said in some instances, some parents had a tendency of confiscating textbooks from their children so as to avoid paying for loss of the books and that in turn also impacted on their studies.
She urged parents to advice their children to take care of textbooks because in replacing them, money paid go directly into government coffers, which then took long to request for funds to replace books.
She said they had tasked the information and technology team to conduct research on the well performing schools to establish what could be the problem with their school.
“This research will assist us to identify weaknesses within our tutoring system or curriculum and rectify them where possible,” she noted.
Again, she said they had also come up with a plan to introduce a supervised Saturday study session, which would take two hours from 8-10am and in the morning on weekdays before lessons commenced with the hope that the move would improve results.
A parent, Ms Minah Mabutho said in an interview that it was critical now for parents to monitor their children’s work and assist them as well as maintain regular consultations with teachers. ENDS