The Minister of Basic Education confirmed this on Sunday.

On Sunday, the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga addressed the media about schools in South Africa and their efforts to ensure that learners complete the prescribed curriculum despite challenges caused by the Coronavirus pandemic.

To the delight of many teachers and learners, Motshekga confirmed that the upcoming October school holidays will not be scrapped, despite the fact that South African schools have already lost more than half of the year’s learning time. 

“Thankfully, we have now begun to measure Covid-19-related learning losses in our local contexts by comparing how much children learnt in 2020 with how much they learned in an average school year before that. These measures indicate that between 50% and 75% of a typical year’s worth of learning was lost during 2020,” Motshekga said.

The Minister added the learners living in poorer areas were particularly impacted. By contrast, learners from middle-class families have access to things like the internet and home support to complete a portion of their studies at home. In rural areas, this is not always the case.

“It is not yet clear whether this is temporary non-attendance, or may become permanent (dropouts) from schooling. In the long run, the learning losses in primary school may lead to an increase in dropouts when these children reach the Further Education and Training (FET) band at Grades 10, 11 and 12,” Motshekga said.

“What we know at this point is that learners with weak learning foundations begin to drop out in more significant numbers as they progress through the grades. This creates an urgent need to recover learning that has been lost,” she said.

Motshekga said that her department decided to keep the October holidays after consultations from various stakeholders, which include teachers unions and school governing bodies. 

Watch her entire media briefing below.