At the start of a new school year, dropout rates are higher and attendance lower than they have been in 20 years — since the pandemic began, about 500,000 children dropped out of school. The task of addressing this challenge has mainly been laid at the feet of teachers, but a community response is needed if we hope to see an improvement in 2022.
The dropout rate is sobering for a few reasons. Attendance is crucial because it is the entry point into the domain of opportunities within the school system. The school should become a place where the pupil wants to be. When attendance is compromised due to school-related factors or social circumstances, it is likely to lead to school disengagement, a weakening of school attachment ties and learning dispositions, and eventual apathy and drop-out.
This is what we refer to as the malicious cycle of deschooling. It has negative effects for the pupils who drop out, for their families and eventually for society as a whole.
The opposite cycle can also occur. As pupils attend and participate in school activities over time, and where the school focuses on increasing and improving opportunities to learn, they develop a learning disposition that involves a behavioural, academic, and an attitudinal orientation towards schooling. This forms the basis for pupil success throughout the schooling years, as well as further studies. We call this the virtuous cycle of schooling.
ALL EYES ON THE ROLE OF TEACHERS
When looking at what we call the three Cs of education — curriculum, care and community — it’s important to recognise that teachers are experts in curriculum. They are hired because they are learning experts.
In the past two years, however, teachers have been burdened with the responsibility of the other two Cs in response to Covid. They have spent significant time in the school day as safety officers, regulating social distancing and hand sanitising, taking temperatures and keeping an eye out for flu-like symptoms. Also, many of the legitimate measures put in place to manage the pandemic have disrupted the lives of children.
According to a World Health Organisation article in January 2021, “depression is one of the leading causes of illness among adolescents, and suicide is the third leading cause of death in people aged 15-19 years”.
A study titled “Youth emotional wellbeing during the Covid-19-related lockdown in SA”, by Gibson Mudiriza and Ariane De Lannoy, found 72% of respondents had symptoms of depression. The responsibility to respond to this heartbreaking trend is usually put on teachers: to first recognise the signs that mental wellbeing is compromised, and then to know where to refer children who are struggling and suffering — if those referral pathways are in place at all.
We risk shifting the focus away from the core purpose of a teacher, namely teaching
Factors such as isolation, food insecurity and fear of losing a breadwinner, interpersonal violence in the household, poverty, stigma, exclusion and living in fragile settings — all factors worsened by the pandemic — can increase the risk of developing mental health problems in young people. They also form part of the diverse set of conditions that fuel dropout rates — others include unreliable school transport, inadequate nutrition and health care, lack of psychosocial support and impaired physical safety.
In October 2021 President Cyril Ramaphosa said he was saddened and concerned to hear how many young people dropped out of school. He challenged teachers specifically to keep dropout rates below 25% — but, as we have shown, this is a complex challenge that d cannot be remedied only in the classroom. More simply put, teachers can’t fix everything. Communities of care, including the government, are needed to provide the support.
Not only is support needed beyond the classroom walls, but if we continue to add to the burden of teachers we edge closer to the tipping point where we risk shifting the focus away from the core purpose of a teacher, namely teaching.
TIME TO TAKE A TEACHER’S HAND
To handle the additional pressures as a result of the pandemic, a community response is important and urgent. Thankfully there are various organisations, educational initiatives and champions within the government whose mission it is to provide support to see our children succeed.
It is worth seeing where we can all innovate to use existing strategies in our different spaces. One example is the zero dropout campaign, which works alongside schools and collaborates with other nonprofit organisations to find ways to keep pupils in the classroom. These include an early warning system tool that “gives educators the power to track warning signs of disengagement, which is a precursor to dropout”.
However, it is important to ensure that the responsibility is not again disproportionately placed on teachers to address this challenge. Here the role of civil society is evident. What if other stakeholders could join hands in using similar tools in their after-school spaces or faith-based organisations to track behaviour change and disengagement?
Family, peer groups and community organisations must help in supporting the mental wellbeing of learners, and such help should include the provision of self-care and coping strategies, helplines, counselling and talk therapy.
After the strains of the past two years, our children and teachers need us more than ever. Our teachers are not tired, they are burnt out. We urgently need to protect and help free them up from tasks that aren’t their sole responsibility so they can teach.
This is a time where we are going to need all hands on deck and leverage the resilient South African spirit. We need a comprehensive, multistakeholder push to support our education system — the children who remain in it and those who have dropped out.
This push is likely to rely on partnerships, innovation and accountability and involve the government, parents and caregivers, funders, corporate social investment managers, faith-based organisations, community organisations and school and community leaders.
These are our schools, our teachers, our children and our future.
• Albertyn is senior education innovation adviser to the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business’s Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Witten is an adjunct associate professor at the centre.
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