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Professor Paul Mavhima

Nqobile Tshili, Chronicle Correspondent
THE Government needs to come up with new strategies of teaching Mathematics as the system being used at the moment is failing to produce positive results, The Deputy Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Professor Paul Mavhima has said.

The Deputy Minister said an assessment done by the Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) whose findings were released at a meeting held in Swaziland two weeks ago shows that local pupils were performing badly in Mathematics.

SACMEQ is an inter-governmental gathering of countries in the Southern and Eastern Africa focusing on the education sector. “SACMEQ is about evaluation of our education system. It’s a forum where we agree that in every five years we test Grade Six pupils against a common standard from 16 countries,” said Prof Mavhima.

He said using the set standard, the 16 countries assess how they were performing in a number of subjects such as Mathematics and other areas such as understanding health issues among others.

“We are doing well, as a country we compare very well with other countries. But there are areas where we want to improve. We don’t think we are doing as much as we should for example about 40 percent of our Grade six cohort of 2013 didn’t do as well as we would have wanted. More so, in Mathematics than in reading and other things we need to look at how we are teaching Mathematics and improve on it,” said Prof Mavhima.

He said the Ministry would next month launch the SACMEQ findings.The Deputy Minister said the Ministry considered the economic situation which led to mass exodus of teachers as one of the reasons for poor pass rates for the class of 2013.

The Grade Six class of 2013 started their education in 2008 at the height of the country’s economic problems.Prof Mavhima said sanctions contributed to low performance in the education sector.

“In our instance there were quite a number of issues that were going on including the fact that our economy suffered due to a number of reasons such as sanctions and has not allowed us to invest as much as we need especially in the educational infrastructure,” said Prof Mavhima.

“There was also a time when we were struggling with teachers. Most of our teachers were not qualified due to a big brain drain with some going to Botswana, South Africa and other regional countries.”—@nqotshili