4 January 2018

The SACP in Limpopo Province notes the release of the 2018 matric results. The Party further notes and appreciates some marked improvement in both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the results. The release of these results triggers a mosaic of lessons, criticism and recommendations for all the parties involved and or concerned with the education of our children. These avalange of lessons, criticisms and recommendations should serve as sources of inspiration to the role players as well as part of a springpot from which further improvements in the provisioning of education is done.

The view of the SACP is that education remains one of the most important tools through which the nationally faced triple burdens to development (being unemployment, poverty and inequality) can be addressed. It is to this end that the SACP congratulates those who performed well and urge those who performed not so well to burn the midnight oil to ensure that they improve their standard of performance by using the opportunity provided for by the state through supplementary examinations, while calling on all those who failed to meet the pass mark requirements to return to school with renewed vigor and zest as education remains an uncontested vehicle for self-improvement and self-development as well as for the total growth and development of South Africa as a country.

• Leave no stone unturned in its effort to improve the teaching-learning situation at all levels in general, but at the early childhood development level in particular and in a lot of areas where learners and teachers with special needs are still calling loudly for appropriate intervention by the state and all.
• Depart from the historic unfair competitive reading, analysis and interpretation of results according to provinces as provinces are indeed not at equal comparative levels. This approach only helps in dampening and eroding further the morality of parties involved in education- especially in the previously disadvantaged area. To close the wide divide between the areas of the haves and the have-nots the state and all parties involved needs to adopt a strategy that seeks to bring equilibrium in the didactic environment.
• Invigorate its plans in the creation of necessary educational of-ramps prior grade twelve to cater for learners who have other talents other than the academic capabilities. This will bring to an end this practical exclusion of affected young people from playing a meaningful role in their own future and in the socio-economic future of their land and its people.
• Add more embitters in its resolve to transform the curriculum, processes and methodologies in the teaching-learning fraternity.

We, in the spirit of the Freedom Charter and the National Development Plan (NDP), are also calling on communities in their individual and organized form to embrace the fact that education is a societal responsibility and to desist from using education as a bargaining chip for their other needs as this is only assisting in perpetuating unemployment, poverty and inequality in the long run- it is a self-defeatist method. To this end we call on all leaders to serve as honest brokers in areas where communities and powers that be are in logger heads while education of the child is allowed to suffer in the process. We call on the state to go to the extent of making disruption of education a punishable offence.

For more information contact: Thobejane Machike (Provincial Spokesperson) at 0823070095