Resources

OPEN LETTER: Civil society calls on Department of Basic Education (DBE) to coordinate an urgent and sustained dropout prevention plan

Covid-19 school closures coupled with the economic shocks of the pandemic have exacerbated a dropout crisis long in the making. Now, more than ever, we need a coordinated national dropout prevention plan and an accelerated learning strategy attuned to the diverse needs of learners, particularly for literacy and numeracy.

Starting a Yethu Club: getting communities involved in preventing dropout

Tefo Gaebetse is part of the first cohort of Champion Teachers joining Yethu Network of Schools. Poverty and inequality are the underlying drivers of dropout and a child’s neighbourhood can significantly impact their experience of school. This is true for rural and urban communities, particularly where school dropout is normalised and becomes an intergenerational issue. […]

Social Media Tools

Download and share on social media You can do your part to raise awareness about dropout prevention strategies by actively showing support for the cause on social media. We want to change perceptions about why learners drop out so that society does not blame so-called ‘lazy and irresponsible teenagers’ for the high rate of dropout. […]

Rising to the challenge: teaching during a pandemic

Nomfundo Khambule is helping learners to feel safe, access a warm meal, and stay connected to school. Dropout is currently three times pre-pandemic levels, with the Covid-19 pandemic worsening the disruptions that would typically cause a learner to dropout.  When schools reopened after a protracted closure last year, many learners did not return to class. […]

Learners are disappearing from our education system

Until recently dropout wasn’t spoken about much, at least not on a national level.  That was until the Covid-19 pandemic began to change our lives.  When schools reopened, many teachers were left wondering why their learners were not returning, and for the first time in years, typically overcrowded classrooms were shrinking. Nomfundo Khambule, a teacher […]

Information Cards

Download and share on social media Tackling dropout in your respective spaces can seem like an insurmountable task if you don’t have the support and buy-in of your peers. To make it easier for you to make a difference and to rally support for the cause, we put together a list of information cards. These […]

Early Warning System Excel Spreadsheet

This Excel spreadsheet will allow educators to capture and track information about individual learners, providing them with the evidence needed to call in additional support, whether academic or psychosocial. This Excel spreadsheet uses a traffic light system to show which learners are at high, medium or low risk. It includes space to capture key observations […]

Action Summit Questions and Answers

On 28 September 2021, we hosted the very first Zero Dropout Action Summit as a launchpad for change. Our panel of education experts tackled some big questions about dropout prevention, but they did not have time to answer all of the questions posed by those who attended the digital event. If your question wasn’t answered […]

Watch the Action Summit

The Zero Dropout Action Summit is an urgent, national response to reducing learner dropout. The summit is a launchpad for change, offering a recommended dropout prevention plan and toolkits for all schools. You can watch the recorded event below.

Dropout is everyone’s problem: reducing dropout is good for South Africa’s economic health

Dropout is at its highest level in 20 years. An additional 500 000 learners have dropped out of school during the pandemic, according to new data from the NIDS-CRAM survey. Many young people who exit the schooling system without completing matric struggle to find decent jobs, and only 1 % […]

Youth voices: this is how a champion teacher changed my life

The reality is that many learners can struggle for years to catch up with their peers. These learners often don’t have the foundational literacy and numeracy skills essential for academic success. Without the foundational reading skills to grasp the curriculum, many learners become disengaged and drop out before completing matric. In South Africa, eight out […]

OPINION: Time to shake up the way we teach with a truly learner-centred approach

By now, South Africa’s literacy crisis is common knowledge. The 2016 PIRLS test results found that eight out of ten Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any language. The drastic implications of this national failure are most acutely felt at the Intermediate phase of our schooling system. The demands facing Grade 4, 5 and 6 learners, who must suddenly contend with large amounts of information — all in English — without the requisite foundational skills to do so, are often too challenging to cope with.

NIDS-CRAM findings reinforce the need for a national catch-up plan

The results of Wave 4 of the National Income Dynamics Study Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS-CRAM) were released this month. The findings of the survey show how disrupted schooling has affected access to school meals, learning trajectories, and gaps in learning.

OPINION: Imagining alternatives to the existing promotion and progression policy

By Nicci Hayes, Centre for Social Development at Rhodes University Our current system of promotion and progression in South Africa — though well-intentioned — has had negative consequences for teaching and learning, specifically for children in some of the country’s most impoverished communities. During my three decades as an educator in the Eastern Cape, I saw first-hand […]

OPINION: Why expanding second chance pathways to matriculation shouldn’t require second thought

After the yearly celebrations at the release of matric results, it’s crucial that we focus on the young people who didn’t reach matric, failed their examinations, or need to improve their marks. A matric certificate has a lot of value in enabling young people to unlock work opportunities and to access further education and training. In the absence of any other school-leaving certificate, a matric is currently the only signalling tool for employers to assess competencies and skills for those who do not complete any post-school studies[…]

VIDEO: Moving from disruption to recovery

Before the pandemic, around 40% of learners who started Grade 1 dropped out before completing matric. So, for many learners, disruptions to schooling are nothing new. But in 2020, things got worse. The type of disruptions that usually lead to disengagement and dropout were amplified by the pandemic. And when schools reopened, about 15% of […]

OPINION: We urgently need to address the challenge of school dropout

The Preamble to our Constitution states that we, the people of South Africa, will work together to create a society in which we ‘free the potential of each person’. It positions the collective potential and capabilities of our citizens as a critical resource to the success in the developmental challenges we face. The reality is, due to the state of education in our country, much of this potential is squandered each year.

OPINION: Covid-19 and repetition

The past year will be remembered as the year of Covid. For children, the pandemic brought with it lockdowns and school closures, and when schools reopened, most children could only attend on alternating days or weeks. As a result, far less teaching, and consequently, far less learning took place. There was also probably much forgetting.

The value of tracking absenteeism

One of the most important changes we can make in our collective effort to reduce school dropout is to start keeping better records about our learners. By tracking individual learners’ absenteeism, academic performance and behaviour, we can better understand their struggles and pathways through school. This will allow us to identify learners at risk of […]

It’s time to raise the alarm!

Despite our success in enrolling children in primary school, we struggle to keep them in school until matric. With so much attention on annual matric pass rates, this major failure of our education system is often hidden. And although we may not recognise it, school dropout affects us all. Dropout is a process of disengagement […]