Online Reporter
ZIMBABWE is very close to seeing all children of school age getting an education, with more than 4,7 million children now in school.
But there are still gaps.
Some families, although not many, do not send children to school for several reasons and children do drop out. Last year, just under 40 000 dropped out before completing their early curriculum development, primary or at least four years of secondary classes.
While that was well below 1 percent of all schoolchildren, about 0,85 percent, the number in absolute terms was large and implies that round about 500 000 children have dropped out somewhere along their school careers, a very large figure even if not much over 10 percent of all schoolchildren.
The biggest losses are in secondary school, about two thirds of all dropouts, and this helps identify the reasons for the losses and steps that must be taken to keep them in the schools, or make it easy for them to return.
We cannot afford, as a country, to have any of our citizens only partially schooled, and the dropout rates cut back on the national policy introduced at independence that all children are entitled to a full primary education and at least four years in secondary school.
The switch to the Education 5.0 model, with practical applications added to the theoretical teaching, make exam results less critical when it comes to earning a living after the school years or advanced training. Children now learn a lot more while at school, and the rise and expansion of vocational training after school, with no entrance qualifications needed to get this training, means that completing all the years allocated to schooling becomes ever more important.
A lot of effort has been made and is being made to ensure that no one is left behind, but we now need to push harder to make sure that this also means families and children cannot be allowed to choose to be left behind.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education is taking a number of steps to ensure schools are accessible to all children, making sure the legal and theoretical right to a minimum 13 years of schooling is also a practical right.
Satellite schools, or classes, have been established and continue to expand, mainly in rural areas, especially those with the lower densities. This means children who live some distance from their nearest school can find their classes within a comfortable walk. The rise of small satellite classes for early curriculum development, where very young children are enrolled at the start of their schooling, is seen as a sensible measure, so these little children can be closer to home and have to walk the full distance only when they are older and bigger.
But such satellite schooling appears to be needed, at least for a modest minority, right the way along the school system. Efforts are being made to open new schools to close gaps, on the basis that it is better to have a large number of smaller and medium-sized schools than a few giant ones. The advantages of that approach go beyond accessibility and help to humanise the school environment and keep children as individual people, rather than cogs in some giant teaching machine.
Already the data collected by the Ministry is uncovering social challenges that should not be permitted, or which are not insurmountable.
A lot of these hit girls more than boys, sometimes a lot more. In that group are teenage pregnancies and early and often forced marriages. Added to this are financial constraints in some families, although the BEAM scheme is supposed to overcome many of these, or the desire to have children working in family concerns or earning an income, in violation of most labour legislation.
Teenage pregnancies are always undesirable, but will occur in every society. The school policy in Zimbabwe is not to condemn the girls, or for that matter the boys of their age who might father children, but to allow them back into the system once they have given birth, preferably with some back-up support and counselling. This is working, but is not catching all the young mothers and probably not even a majority. Where non teenage fathers are involved we have prosecutable offences as well as civil courts that can enforce support for children.
The early marriages are all illegal, but the large number of unregistered customary unions allows them to be sneaked in under the radar, almost always with the connivance of the girl’s parents and all too often with that of the girl, especially if she sees no other practical option. For all sorts of reasons, we need to work on this challenge, probably using traditional leaders more to teach everyone that the practice is totally unacceptable and once again offer practical support to the girl being forced into marriage. And we need to find these teenagers and get them back into school.
Child labour could be a more intractable challenge in very poor families, but we have been able to cope with child-headed households and other effects of family disaster, so again we need to educate families and need to help them cope without child labour, investing in the future of their children rather than seeking short-term gain.
Children with disabilities, at least disabilities severe enough to drop out of school, are small in number, but again special classes and other means will result in no one being left behind.
