[LISTEN] Are school dropouts increasing?

Cape Talk host, Clarence Ford, speaks to Merle Mansfield, Programme Director of the Zero Dropout Campaign, about the spike in school dropout in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mansfield elaborates on the causes of school dropout, explaining that dropout has largely been normalised and credited to learners being “lazy” or “disinterested” but this is not the case. She explains that instead dropout comes at the end of a long process of disengagement in which a learner is pulled, or pushed, away from school by factors beyond their control.