05 Mar 2019

The Permanent Secretary to the President Mr Carter Morupisi has called on teachers at Mokgalo Junior Secondary School in Lecheng to pull up their socks in order to produce good results. 

Addressing the teaching staff at the school recently, Mr Morupisi urged them to determine why the school had been performing badly. 

Last year, 190 students sat for the Junior Secondary Certificate Examination and registered a pass rate of only 23.2 per cent .

There were no As, only five Bs, 39 Cs, 78 Ds, 37 Es and 31 Us. 

Mr Morupisi said he called the meeting to learn about the challenges the school, teachers, and students experienced and to come up with a mitigation plan. 

He noted that the school’s pass rate had been hovering around 20 per cent for years while it had for sometime been coming last of all schools in the country.

Mr Morupisi said the poor performance signified  that something was not right and therefore needed to be rectified.

“I do not believe that you are incapable as teachers. You have been trained in the same institutions that your compatriots have been trained and the performance of students at their schools is acceptable,” he said.

Meanwhile the school head Ms Janet Kgwadi has enumerated the challenges besieging the school chief among them parents’ reluctance to attend Parents Teachers Association meetings, which described as a setback. 

Another factor contributing to the school’s poor performance was indiscipline, she said. Ms Kgwadi noted that some students, especially boarders, absconded from school, revealing that currently 19 had deserted. 

She said boarding facilities were in a bad state with windows and doors broken and requested that the school be considered for cyclic maintenance.

The school head further indicated that the school had a shortage of equipment such as a photocopy machine.

Among the challenges she also mentioned shortage of teachers’ houses adding that the available ones were dilapidated with six having sewerage problems. Ms Kgwadi said teachers’ inadequacies needed to be addressed.

Teachers said the use of English as a medium of instruction was problematic because students did not comprehend it well. Ends