Covid-19 pandemic sharply increases SA’s school dropout rate

While Limpopo has the largest number of pupils in the country who repeat grades 8 to 11, it also has the lowest dropout rate.

Servaas van der Berg, an economics professor at Stellenbosch University, has estimated that keeping repeaters in SA’s schooling system is costing the fiscus R25bn annually.

According to his latest research, which was funded by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the average repeat rate among grades 8 to 11 in Limpopo is 29%, compared with the national average of 20%. 

In the other provinces, the Free State has a repeat rate of 21%, North West 21%, KwaZulu-Natal 20%, Northern Cape 20%, Eastern Cape 19%, Mpumalanga 19%, Gauteng 16% and Western Cape 12%.Van der Berg found that Limpopo also has the highest percentage of overage pupils in each of the different grades — 27% of pupils in that province were overage by three years or more, compared with 10% in Gauteng and 8% in the Western Cape.

Van der Berg said the money spent on keeping repeaters at school could be used to improve the teacher-pupil ratio by employing more teachers. “If somebody stays at school for 15 years and still only completes grade 10, then you have got five years of wasted spending on them,” he said.

Describing the repetition rate in Limpopo as “massively large”, he said observers were seeing “to some extent a slightly lower dropout rate in Limpopo”. One of the main reasons for the high repetition rate in Limpopo is “the low cognitive levels that really come from the primary school”.

“By the time children reach the higher grades, most of those problems should have been dealt with, but we still have this residual lack of background, which just means that the ability to absorb information in the higher grades is deficient.”

Van der Berg’s study comes amid an analysis conducted by the department of basic education of a report by Stats SA which found that the number of children aged seven to 15 who were not attending school had jumped from 1% of the total pupil enrolment in 2018 (99,646 pupils) to 1.4% in 2019 (144,627 pupils).

In the Western Cape, the percentage of these children not attending school increased from 1.6% in 2018 to 2.3% in 2019, and in Gauteng from 1.1% to 1.6%.The latest results of the National Income Dynamics Study — Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (Nids-Cram), released on Thursday, reveal that 650,000 to 750,000 children aged seven to 17 were not attending school by May this year, representing an increase in the number of absent pupils of 400,000-500,000 compared with pre-Covid times.

However, this increase did not represent a “permanent dropout” but rather a “transient or temporary dropout”, said Debra Shepherd, a researcher at Stellenbosch University and a co-author of the Nids-Cram research.

“We should expect to see some of these learners return, but how many is difficult to say. It would be really important to continue to monitor and measure learner attendance to see perhaps with the removal of rotational timetabling in primary schools whether this will have an impact on learners returning,” Shepherd said.

Professor Martin Gustafsson, an adviser to the department of basic education, said one reason for the non-attendance of the 7- to 15-year-olds was that the schooling system outside Gauteng and the Western Cape did not provide opportunities, especially for intellectually disabled children.

“A further factor would be very marginalised children from poor households who are in and out of school,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that the 1.4% are never in school. Households do go through some really bad times and the children stay at home.”

Merle Mansfield, programme director of the Zero Dropout Campaign, said many pupils who drop out fall into the category known as “not in education, employment or training”.

“The truth is that there are not many opportunities for learners who do not have a matric, and their likelihood of accessing gainful employment is also slim,” Mansfield said.

Daleen Labuschagne, MD of the Khula Development Group in the Western Cape, which assists children in the winelands area who drop out of school to return, said some attend school once a week or less if they have “poor supervision” from parents.

She said the lack of access to virtual classes and minimal personal assistance with homework on “rotational” off days contributed to pupils staying at home.