Vusumuzi Dube
Rutendo Nyeve, Sunday News Reporter
THE Government is working on measures to embrace Information and Communications Technologies in rural schools through servers which will be accessible without the use of internet or Wi-Fi, a development that seeks to reduce failure rate especially those getting zero percent pass rate.
Servers are special, powerful computers that provide ‘services’ to the client computers on the network. These services might include providing a central, common file storage area, sharing hardware such as printers as well as controlling who can or can’t have access the network.
Responding to questions at the national assembly on Wednesday, the Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Torerai Moyo said his Ministry is also investigating why certain schools are getting zero percent pass rates.
“What we are doing as a Ministry is to look at those schools that continually have a zero percent pass rate. We have a raft of measures; we want to carry out research studies to establish the causes of zero percent pass rates, whether it is a culmination of shortages of teaching/learning materials in those schools. We have seen that zero percent pass rate is usually scored by schools in the rural areas as there is serious disparities between urban and rural schools,” he said.
He said rural schools are disadvantaged very largely as compared to urban schools and they are going to pursue measures of embracing ICT in schools for online learning to happen in the rural areas.
“We are going to embrace a server which will be accessible even in rural areas without the use of internet or Wi-Fi. That server will be deployed to the Administration block and any learner within the radius of 100 to 200 metres, will have access to that server where teachers can upload learning materials on the server and learners will have access to that server, even notes can be uploaded to that. Assignments can also be uploaded to that server
“So, this is one of the ways of ensuring that we reduce the failure rate, especially in schools that are getting zero percent pass rate. Basically, we want to ensure that we carry out a study to establish what could be the causes of zero percent pass rate,” he said.
Meanwhile, Minister Moyoy said they managed to release ‘O’ level results in January due to the hard work that is happening in the Ministry of Education and also that in 2023, they never had any leakages at ZIMSEC.
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