14 Nov 2017

Morwamosu Primary School head, Ms Badireleng Maripe says frequent transfers of pupils in the school have a negative impact on their performance.

Speaking in an interview, Ms Maripe  said they have had instances where learners were transferred to other schools for various reasons, but later brought back. 

She said this has proven to be a challenge because it was not only causing confusion and disturbance to learning pattern of students, but also negatively impacted on their school performance.

Consequently, she said they continued to engage parents in this matter as well as address other issues that contributed to poor performance such as shortage of teachers. 

Ms Maripe said she was optimistic that this year, the school would record a good performance because the teacher quota has since reached 100 per cent.

“In the past, we had shortage of teachers because those who were transferred out were not replaced. We relied on temporary teachers who were engaged for a very short and this was causing disturbance to the learning patterns of our students,” she said,.

This year, she said internal test results had shown improvement and they were hopeful that the examination performance would equally improve. 

She noted that even though they recorded low grades for the past two years, they were aiming for better results this year.

“In 2015, we saw our school dropping to a low of 58 per cent pass from 86 per cent, which was obtained in 2014. 

As if that was not enough, we continued to drop to 42 per cent last year, but since the teachers have arrived, I am optimistic that this year we will improve significantly,” she said.

On the issue of food supply to the school, school head said unlike last year, they had a variety of foodstuffs in their menu and they were able to feed the students properly. 

She also said their requests for food was acceded to well on time and there was no disruption to classes. However, Ms Maripe noted that shortage of equipment and stationery was still a challenge in her school. 

She said they did not have photocopying and fax machines, hence they could not effectively send communications on time.

She also said they struggled to photocopy test papers and had to rely on offices in the Kgalagadi region since they were far from other regions in their district.

She also noted that one of the teachers could not find decent accommodation since Morwamosu was a small village with no rental accommodation.

She said the teacher was currently accommodated at a VDC house with a leaking roof. BOPA