A group of pupils in matric will be the first candidates to sit for a national senior certificate marine sciences exam since the subject was piloted in 2019 for grades 10 and 11.
Delivering the department’s adjusted budget vote speech at the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Tuesday, minister of basic education Angie Motshekga said since the subject was piloted, the intake in the subject had increased to more than 300 pupils in grades 10 and 11.
“As a high school subject offering, SA can be proud that the offering of marine sciences is a world first. The department was also collaborating with the department of transport to finalise the draft aviation curriculum to ensure that it is aligned with the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (Caps) policy,” she said.
Motshekga said the department had allocated budgets for the specialised curriculum oriented towards 11 learning fields. The department received R2.3bn for the curriculum, policy and monitoring programme.
She told the house that there were focus schools established to cater for pupils with special talents and aptitudes across a wide range of scholastic endeavours.
“These schools will constitute a legislatively distinct category of public schools that offer a specialised curriculum oriented toward 11 learning fields. A total of 103 schools in all nine provinces have been audited to pilot occupational subjects.
"The Caps for grades 8 and 9 has been developed and submitted to Umalusi for appraisal and quality assurance and in preparation for the pilot, materials have been developed,” Motshekga said.
She said the department had been allocated R27bn for the 2021/22 medium-term expenditure framework and R20.7bn was allocated for conditional grants.
An amount of R288.7bn was allocated for provincial education departments, R6.9bn disbursed among individual provincial education departments for payment of educator posts, Unemployment Insurance Fund, saving school government body (SGB) appointed educator posts and saving educator posts in state-funded independent schools.
A further R2.4bn has been earmarked to secure the SGB-appointed educator posts in fee- paying public schools and educator posts in the state-subsidised independent schools.
The department’s deputy minister Reginah Mhaule said the department had received new allocations of R16.2m for general support for the systematic improvement of language and numeracy in foundation phase and R19.9m for technology for pupils in grades 7 to 9.
She said the department had made inroads on all official languages and had collaborated with several stakeholders, including the Pan South African Language Board, to start work on the promotion and development of the Khoekhoewab (Nama) language.
“We are conducting an audit of Khoi, Nama and San communities in the Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, Western Cape and Free State provinces in order to plan on how these languages should be phased into the schooling system,” Mhaule said.
She said to get the system ready for implementation the department had collaborated with the National Education Collaboration Trust and developed grades 4 to 6 SAL toolkits for incremental introduction of African languages (IIAL), (isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele, Siswati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana), Nama and Kiswahili.
“The grades 4- to 6 toolkit includes structured learning programmes and has been integrated into the electronic resource packs,” she said.
The budget was welcomed by members of the NCOP.
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