ANA results withheld after conflict

The results of the 2015 Annual National Assessments will not be made public after disruptions last year.

Cape Town - The results of the 2015 Annual National Assessments (ANA), which the Department of Basic Education had wanted 8.6 million pupils across the country to write, will not be made public.

The tests were at the centre of a spat between teacher unions and the department last year, with unions announcing that their members would boycott them, while the department remained adamant they should be administered.

In the Western Cape, provincial education head Penny Vinjevold issued a letter to schools in November, which asked them to consider administering the tests, if their programme allowed.

Eventually, pupils at only some schools in the province wrote the tests.

Elijah Mhlanga, spokesman for the Department of Basic Education, said there would be no public release of the results.

“The 2015 ANA was disrupted at a critical stage when some schools already had test papers in their custody and others did not. Consequently, there could be no guarantee that all schools administered ANA under standardised conditions to guarantee the reliability and credibility of the results.”

The test were introduced in 2011 and assess pupils’ numeracy and literacy skills.

But, last year, unions said ANA “in its current form” was not in the best interest of pupils and failed to guarantee the provision of quality education.

The South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) said that while the tests were supposed to be a diagnostic tool “it has been reduced to an onslaught on teachers with no intention to improve the system by ensuring fit for purpose intervention”.

The tests were initially scheduled to be written in September last year but, following the opposition from unions, the department announced that they had been postponed to last month.

Unions said this postponement would allow time for the tests to be remodelled.

However, some schools didn’t receive the message that the tests had been postponed in time and pupils wrote them anyway.

The department indicated it did not believe this would compromise the ANA as a whole.

Later in September, after a meeting of the Council of Education Ministers, the department announced that the tests would be written in December last year.

Unions said the department had invested R200 million for the administration of ANA and therefore “can’t afford to forego the business interests of its partners”.

They mobilised their members against writing the assessments.

Mhlanga said the department had advised schools to utilise their own assessment results internally to inform their improvement programmes.

“Meantime, a process is under way to remodel ANA so future national ANA results meet the high standards of reliability and credibility that the department pursues.”

Sadtu spokeswoman Nomusa Cembi said the 2015 ANA had been a waste of time and money and had put teachers and children under unnecessary pressure. She said the union wanted the remodelling of the ANA to be taken seriously.

Anthea Cereseto, president of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa, said the decision not to release the results, was the right one.

“Whatever results would’ve been announced would not have been considered credible.

“Looking to the future, it has to be ensured that a thorough review process is done.”

Jessica Shelver, spokeswoman for Education MEC Debbie Schäfer, said the Western Cape schools that wrote the tests had marked and analysed them internally.

She said the results of the Western Cape Education Department’s own systemic numeracy and literacy tests, written by more than 200 000 pupils in October, would be used to measure performance within the system.

ilse.fredericks@inl.co.za

Cape Argus