08 Feb 2018

Ministry of Basic Education, regional operations director, Mr Benson Rauwe has admitted that indiscipline amongst pupils from Kweneng public schools has contributed to embarrassing academic performance.

“Kweneng region has not performed as we anticipated, and I am not surprised. There are lots of dynamics that contribute to these pupils to perform as badly as they did. One of them is undoubtedly indiscipline,” said Mr Rauwe.

The regional director said there were some pupils in schools that seemed not to know why they were there.

He said pupils were mostly the academically challenged, and that they ended up seeking attention for the wrong reasons.

“Such pupils end up being engaged in the abuse of alcohol and substance abuse. The worst part is that they bring them to school facilities and expose other pupils to them. Though there are random searches done in schools other pupils manage to smuggle drugs and objects such as knives and screw drivers,” he noted.

He gave the example of a student at Mahupu Unified School who stabbed a fellow student with a knife and murdered him last year.

“The student who stabbed another one was suspended and he illegally entered the school premises and stabbed another one. The case is being handled by the police and is now beyond us,” he stated.  

Mr Rauwe stressed that cases of indiscipline amongst pupils made some schools ungovernable.

He added that there were other dynamics behind the indiscipline of pupils.

He said some of the reasons why pupils portrayed indiscipline was the fact that parents were not involved in their children’s education as they should be.

Mr Rauwe also noted that most parents in his region stayed at the lands and farms leaving their children to stay by themselves which accorded them unlimited freedom.

He said he had observed that there was no parent/teacher and child relationships as parents had left all of the responsibility on teachers and the school management.

He added that urbanisation had also contributed to crippling their performance.

“Parents have the perception that the best schools are found in towns and cities, and as a result most of the parents transfer their best performing children to such schools while the average and badly performing are left behind to fill the schools in the region,” he said.

He noted that most of their junior schools admitted those who passed with Cs and Ds.

“This means teachers will have to work extra hard to turn the Cs and Ds into As and Bs,” he explained.

Furthermore, he noted that some of the teachers did contribute to the poor performance of students.

He revealed that there were some teachers who were performing below the required standard.  

To improve the results, he said the regional office has come up with different strategies to tackle the disheartening issue.

Mr Rauwe said some of the strategies include teachers accounting for the results they produced.

He stated that there would be monthly evaluations of the test results in each and every school in their region to try and track the performance of students.

“We want our best performing students to maintain their performance while the least performing students will also be assisted aggressively to upgrade their grades. We have also engaged the students who are part of the

Student Representative Council to encourage others to set their own targets and strive to achieve them. This will help in students keeping track of their own performance instead of banking on teachers. We are also engaging parents to be fully committed in their children’s academic life by having random visits to schools to check on their performance, ” he said.

Furthermore Mr Rauwe pointed out that their ministry was also looking at working with teachers to uplift their morale by acknowledging and appreciating the best performing teachers.

He said it would motivate them to work even harder and encourage the least performing teachers to strive for excellence.

The recently published Junior Certificate Examinations indicated that the best performing school in the region was Letlole Mosielele and Sedumedi JSS which attained 39.9 per cent pass rate, and that the best student was from Mogoditshane JSS, who was one of only two who obtained merit.

The least performing school in the region was Lempu JSS.

“In our region we are fortunate enough to have the resources such as qualified teachers, books and most of our schools are fully resourced. All that needs to be done is to strive for excellence and implement strategies that will assist in improving academic results in Kweneng,” he concluded. ENDS