Haniff Hoosen, the ID Spokesperson for Education, says the ID ‘welcomes the review of the current National Curriculum Statement and, in particular, the external literacy and numeracy testing at grades 3,6 and 8.’

The ID Member of Parliament’s comments come after an announcement by Minister of Education Angie Motshekga yesterday that the new curriculum Schooling 2025 would replace the outcomes based education (OBE) system, which was introduced in 1998.

‘Recent surveys have proven that South African children are extremely poor performers in terms of numeracy and literacy skills, with figures from Jet Educational Services finding that only about 36% of children can read and count by the time they are eight, or nine years old,’ Mr Hoosen says.

‘However, without proper training for teachers, these important changes will not make much of a difference to the quality of education received by our children. There remain thousands of teachers who do not even have a matric qualification and more effort must therefore be placed on training teachers adequately to prepare our children.’

For media enquiries, please call Haniff Hoosen on 084 2000 460