Giving oral evidence to the committee for Education, Sport, Arts and Culture in Harare on Thursday, the Permanent Secretary for Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Constance Chigwabha has told Parliamentary Portfolio on Education said some teachers performed worse than their students.
He revealed to the committee that teachers had been beaten by primary school pupils in mock Grade 6 examinations.
“We used a yellow question paper and a white one for children and teachers, respectively, and the result was shocking. We laughed our lungs out as some teachers were actually beaten by their pupils,’ said Chigwabha.
Chigwada said his ministry was working to standardize minimum qualifications for trainee and practising teachers.
“Teacher training colleges have been enrolling student teachers without essential subjects such as Mathematics, English and Science, a trend which has contributed to poor school examination results. With the standardisation system teachers without the essential subjects would be assisted to study and pass them while in service,” said Chigwabha.
The ministry also attributed the high schools examination failure rate to illegal schools which lacked qualified teachers.
“Most of these mushrooming illegal private schools have no qualified teaching staff hence the high failure rate at the institutions and nationally. Besides lacking qualified staff, they also have inadequate teaching aids.
“In this respect, government will intensify its crackdown on such illegal institutions. It will also increase funding towards the establishment of science laboratories at all legal schools from around
20 to 70 percent,” Chigwabha told the parliamentary portfolio.
More than 80 percent of O-level students who sat for examinations in
2012 failed.
In 2011 only 12 percent of children who sat for the ‘O’ Level Examinations passed while the 2012 pass rate stood at 18 percent.
The automatic promotion of children from Grade 1 up to Form 4 was cited as another cause for the poor Ordinary Level results.
Recently, there was call to re-introduce the Zimbabwe Junior Certificate for Form 2 students, with proponents arguing that it would help improve standards and screen out poorly performing students.
Rural schools particularly perform poorly because of a critical shortage of learning material, qualified teachers, high teacher-student ratios and other enabling resources.
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Why not categorize it as per private and public and let us see for ourselves? problem is you take time to react to situations like this, do you need COPAC!!!! even if a teacher does not have Maths, Sicnce etc at O level that doesnt make them worse than a pupil with no Grade 7 at all. I mean someone who passed grade 7 and secondary should pass Grade 6!!!!!