Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. A REPORT released yesterday has exposed a serious learning crisis in Zimbabwe, revealing that 83% of pupils lack minimum proficiency in reading and maths by the time they complete primary school.
According to the report, one in six children in Zimbabwe complete primary school with minimum proficiency in reading and maths.
The revelations expose a deep-seated crisis in the education sector, which is struggling due to years of underfunding, teacher exodus, shortage of learning material, job action by the teachers, lack of fees, among a myriad of other challenges.
To add to the crisis, the government has for years failed to fund the Basic Education Assistance Module, a programme that provides school fees, levies and examination fees for vulnerable children.
Launched in 2001, its goal is to help under-privileged children who fail to access education due to economic hardship — including orphans and children with disabilities.
The Spotlight Report: Lead for Foundational Learning also made another stunning revelation, stating that 90% of children on the African continent would not have acquired fundamental skills by the end of primary school.
It highlighted that wealth and gender gaps remain areas to address, adding that “while 98% of the richest complete primary education in Zimbabwe, that falls to 78% of the poorest”.
“When only one in 10 children achieve minimum proficiency, and head teachers tell us they are clerks, teachers and accountants all in one, we have a problem.
“We are demanding instructional leadership while simultaneously burdening our school leaders under a mountain of paperwork.
“We must immediately free up principals to delegate administrative tasks and focus on the core job: ensuring that children can learn,” said Manos Antoninis, the director for the Unesco GEM Report.
The report stated that Zimbabwe does not have a textbook policy in place for primary school, and does not provide teacher guides for mathematics or reading, which help teachers to implement the curriculum and achieve learning objectives.
It, however, credited the southern African nation “for its large-scale school feeding programme, which supports children’s learning”.
“Zimbabwe’s programme is 100% government subsidised (one of only 10 countries on the continent to do so) and covers two-thirds of primary schoolchildren.”
It highlighted that while Zimbabwe has five of the six key school leadership policies in place, most school heads say administrative work outweighs teaching priorities, limiting their ability to improve learning.
It also warned that lack of a national learning assessment framework leaves education systems “operating in the dark”.
The report was released by the African Union in partnership with Unesco’s Global Education Monitoring Report and the African Centre for School Leadership.
It offers a stark new assessment, confirming that “learning levels in Africa are lower than previously thought”.
The report indicates that by Grade 3, most students in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Zambia cannot read a single word.
The report identifies several systemic failures driving the crisis.
A critical issue is a severe scarcity of basic resources; in Cameroon, with up to 23 students sharing a single textbook on average.
The report indicated that language barriers are widespread, with over half of African countries failing to provide textbooks in children’s home languages, making early literacy acquisition extremely difficult.
The report notes that “only 20% of countries has a national assessment framework”, meaning most have no clear learning objectives to guide teaching.
A central finding of the report is that school leaders are overburdened with administrative tasks, leaving no time for their role as instructional leaders.
Principals in 14 low- and middle-income countries spend 68% of their time on routine management.
The report also reveals a gap in preparing leaders, with “only 19% of countries requiring principals to have prior training before taking on their role.”
The report urged countries to adopt the new African Union Continental Assessment Framework to generate reliable data.
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