Pretoria - The Gauteng Education Department will provide extra lessons for matric students in underperforming schools to improve the matric results across the province.
The lessons, which will be run throughout the June and July 2010 mid-year break as well as during the September school holidays, will target learners from 276 underperforming schools and include classes in subjects such as Maths, Maths Literacy, Accounting, Physical Science, Life Sciences, and English First Additional Language.
Education MEC Barbara Creecy said the programme has been running on a pilot basis since 14 April this year and has attracted widespread support from learners in the affected schools.
She said that standardised lesson plans, including exercises and tests have been developed specially for the programme by experts and are distributed to each site for each session.
"Tutors selected to participate in the programme have a proven track record of good results in the six targeted subjects and the department has deployed special monitoring teams to ensure that the programme runs effectively and that quality teaching and learning happens," Creecy said.
She said that the department conducted research in January to fully understand where it needed to target matric improvement interventions.
"Out of 30 397 learners who failed matric in 2009, two out of three came from the schools targeted by this programme, all these schools achieved a less than 70 percent matric pass rate last year.
"We further analysed subject pass rates for all subjects offered by the department at matric level and out of 79 subjects offered, six subjects accounted for the bulk of the failures," Creecy explained.
She added that if a greater number of learners were to further their educational and career opportunities, the department needed to focus on 276 schools and provide assistance to learners in the six subjects.
The programme will run over a four-year period while the department increases the capacity of the schools and educators to improve learner performance.
