02 Mar 2020

Schools in the southern region have been urged to find ways of turning around their performance to attain the national pass target.

Acting director in the Ministry of Basic Education (MoBE) in the southern region, Mr Ndineni Mbuso said education had gone down in the past five years and thus called on stakeholders to find solutions to the situation.

Mr Mbuso was speaking at the southern region retreat dubbed Southern Region Maduo Pitso 2020 held at Big Valley Game Lodge near Lobatse recently.

A discussion of the region’s performance in the 2019 national examinations indicated that many schools were constantly scoring below the national pass target in primary, junior and senior secondary school examinations over the last five years.

The southern region is made up of schools in Lobatse, Moshupa, Kanye, Jwaneng and Good Hope education sub regions. It is the second largest of the 10 regions after the central region.

One of the region’s chief education officers, Mr Abram Molelowamodimo, said majority of their 119 primary schools attained below the 80 per cent national ABC pass target last year.

“Only 32 schools reached the 80 per cent ABC pass target in the Primary School Leaving Examinations with four having reached the 100 per cent pass rate.  Ten schools were below 50 per cent, with the lowest being Lefhoko by 25.3 per cent,” Mr Molelowamodimo explained.

He, however, said the region’s average performance of 70.4 per cent was slight improvement by 1.2 per cent compared to its 2018 PSLE score.

He said 72 schools improved results, the highest improved being Dipotsana Primary School by 57.1 per cent.

Mr Molelowamodimo said Lobatse sub-region led the way in terms of PSLE performance with 79.3 per cent followed by Moshupa and Kanye with just over 72 per cent, while Jwaneng and Good Hope lagged behind with 66.5 and 66.1 per cent respectively.

“Looking at the 80 plus ratio you will see that we have never reached our target. There are some instances where we have performed better like 2017 where we reached 70.4 per cent. Then we declined to 69.2 per cent, then we moved up again to 70.4. It is an improvement, but we must make it a point that we move away from here to the bracket where we aspire to be,” he said.

Giving an overview of the region’s performance in Junior Certificate Examinations (JCE), Mr Ruth Matlhape, who is also a chief education officer, said only four out of 30 junior schools in the southern region attained a national target pass of 50 per cent.

She said the schools included Kgosimpe and Morama in the Jwaneng sub-region with 59.7 and 59 per cent respectively, and Itireleng and Pitikwe in Lobatse with 56.3 and 55.7 per cent respectively.

“The least schools are Mariba (in Mabule) and Mogale (in Maokane) with 16.77 and 16.8 per cent respectively. These are boarding schools and among other challenges that may be common to most schools, they are hard hit by unique challenges. Mogale was over-subscribed. Mogale, Molongwa and Nthwalang have high teacher-student ratio with about 50-70 learners per class,” she said.

She said the region registered 36.1 pass rate last year, which was a slight improvement from 34.9 per cent in 2018.

She called on stakeholders to find solution to the below par performance.

“Our performance was not significant. If we fail to empower these boys and girls we are not going to improve as a country. If we continue working hard we will one day achieve the target,” she said.

Highlighting the region’s performance in the Botswana General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE), another chief education officer, Mr Gofenyaone Ponoesele, said all the four senior secondary schools in the region achieved significant improvement last year.

Mr Ponoesele said Lobatse Senior School improved from 25.5 in 2018 to 32.7 per cent last year, Moshupa Senior from 19.7 to 31.3 per cent, Seepapitso Senior from 21.6 to 28.1 per cent, and Good Hope from 10.9 to 20.6 per cent.

Participants of the retreat put the poor performance down to factors like shortage of resources, high teacher-students ratio and transfers of good performing students out of their schools. ENDS