MoBE welcomes skills development

Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday May 2, 2022 06:00

The changes were primarily predicated upon a desire to drive the Reset Agenda and improve service deliver. Some ministries have become leaner after shedding excess fats while others have grown bigger after assuming additional responsibilities. Some of the changes were expected while others came as a complete surprise.

The least expected was perhaps the widening of the Ministry of Basic Education’s (MoBE) jurisdiction and functions. The reconfiguration exercise has seen the education ministry reverting to its former self after being rechristened the Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MOESD). The change in nomenclature heralds the return of the skills component.

Though it will obviously come not without its own challenges, the restoration of the skills development is a welcome move. One has reason to suspect that the move signals a statement of intent to attach a greater premium on the goal of addressing the challenge of skills deficit that continues to dog our economy. The new nomenclature would now serve as a constant reminder of the need to fast track curriculum reforms with the goal of creating a balance between content and skills development. Lessons from the past show that in its former life as MOESD, the ministry did not live to expectations. Its approach to skills development was that of benign neglect.

Having been a classroom practitioner myself, I am pretty aware of the stumbling blocks that are denying the skill component freedom of expression. Ours is an examination-oriented system and schools are judged and ranked on how well they fare on final national examinations. Therefore one cannot fault schools for having their eyes fixated on national examinations.

The totalitarian focus on examinations gives little room for development and assessment of skills at the school level. Schools are the field studies conducted by Professor Jaap Kuiper while researching on low academic attainment in secondary schools in Botswana demonstrated the benign neglect that continues to plague the skills development.

His observations were that, “It seems that at least to some extent, the BGCSE curriculum in Botswana shows movement towards the inclusion of skill development. However, Skills and Content are not integrated into a whole through specific formulation of integrative learning outcomes. The effect of this lack of integrating skills and content is that, teachers likely focus on the content (or the BGCSE assessment syllabus, which also equally skewed towards content) rather than on the development of skills. Assessment appears to rely mostly on nationally designed examinations.”

It is clear that skills development programme needs to find more epaper curriculum aimed at development of skills.

It appears that teachers at school are not clear about what role school-based assessment is supposed to play. It is largely seen as setting standard tests and half-yearly examinations etc. It does not incorporate much, if any, measuring of the development of specific skills by the students.

School-based assessment - necessary to measure whether students develop skills - is not well developed, even though the assessment syllabi state an intention of developing such.

Assessment: Are we measuring whether learners have Kknowledge as well as skills?

As we will also see from the fieldwork (Chapter 6), teachers, and schools in general, see school-based assessment as simply ‘more of the same’ in relation to what the national examinations already do as well. School-based assessment is believed to be the administering of regular standard tests, in the form of weekly small tests to the development and application of larger termly or half-yearly school-based examinations. There is very little evidence that there is any kind of assessment developed and applied, which results in reports on the extent to which students develop specific skills.

Assessment is narrow, and focuses on measuring rote-learnt knowledge, not on skill development. Then we need to work on a more appropriate curriculum

School-based assessment is not well understood or used

It appears that teachers at school are not clear about what role school-based assessment is supposed to play. It is largely seen as setting standard tests and half-yearly examinations etc. It does not incorporate much, if any, measuring of the development of specific skills by the students. Once more, the fieldwork chapter will provide much more detail on this.

The disturbing finding is that the BGCSE Programme Aims (indicating skills that are to be acquired by students) of Senior Secondary Education are ignored by school managers and teachers. In such a dire situation, Senior Secondary Education will never achieve its aim. There is a need to integrate content and skills.

Another problem is that the curriculum seems to be rather overloaded (as curricula anywhere in the world then to become over time). There is a need to achieve a better balance between subjects, time, content, skills, national and school-based assessment, etc.