About 2,000 matric exam markers have had to withdraw from marking the National Senior Certificate exam scripts due to various reasons, including those who tested positive for Covid-19.
But the department of basic education says it will complete the marking in the next 10 days despite having to replace those who withdrew from the process.
Marking began last week amid mass withdrawals by markers due to positive Covid-19 tests, bereavement and fears of contacting the virus. The process is scheduled to be completed on January 21.
The provincial departments have been sending out e-mails to those who have done marking in the past in a bid to have them ready to replace those who withdraw.
Basic education department spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga said they were still confident that marking would be completed as scheduled.
Mathanzima Mweli, the department's director-general, said there was no crisis in getting the markers replaced as they had anticipated since March last year that Covid-19 would negatively impact on the marking of matric scripts.
“It's been a hectic week in examination marking line function ... provinces made sure that their reserve list catered for much more numbers than they would ordinarily do and it has shown so far that there has been no crisis at all in getting the markers replaced because that has been fully addressed in the planning,” Mweli said.
Mweli is expected to brief the media today on progress made in the marking process after having visited six provinces and 181 marking centres.
A report by the Eastern Cape education department has shown that 292 officials at marking centres, which include markers, school staff, managers and security officers tested positive for Covid-19 during the mandatory screening and testing up to Saturday.
The province has a shortage of 45 markers and 167 exam assistants and it was working towards finding replacements. In Gauteng, about 800 markers withdrew last week and were replaced.
SA Democratic Teachers Union secretary Mugwema Maluleke said they were happy with the progress made despite the withdrawal of markers.
“If there's going to be challenges along the way, as a country we need to appreciate that we are working under unique Covid conditions, which may change any day. We may easily find ourselves having a centre that needs to be closed due to positive cases and it may take a while to get replacements trained and ready,” Maluleke said.
Basil Manuel, the executive director at the National Professional Teachers' Organisation of SA, said preventing markers from contracting the virus was no easy task.
“People travel in and out of the centres, then they may decide to walk down the road and meet so and so. It's a big task,” Manuel said.
The marking centres opened their doors on Monday last week nationwide and 45,000 markers got ready to mark 14 million scripts from Thursday.
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