Angie Motshekga: ‘We are not scrapping holidays,’ she tells MPs

Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga says her department has no plans of doing away with school holidays, TimesLive reports.

Motshekga reportedly appeared before Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Basic Education on Tuesday, 24 August 2021.

“We are not scrapping holidays. The DG reported we have lost lots of time. In January we lost lots of days and he said we will alter the curriculum so we can have the full number of days we are supposed to be teaching. With the second wave, the DG explained, we also lost a week because we were forced to close early,” she said.

The department’s proposal to scrap the school holidays was met with much opposition from the education fraternity, particularly teacher unions who expressed outrage because they were not consulted.

Pupils are scheduled to take a break from school for a week (4 October-11 October), however the department had wanted those days to be utilised in the classroom, to catch up on the work lost as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Angie Motshekga on recovering lost classroom time

Angie Motshekga has told MPs that additional would be found within the remaining days in the school calendar and not necessarily the holidays.

“What we have committed ourselves to as a department was that we are going to look for days in the remaining days to compensate for those lost. It’s not scrapping. It’s our efforts to recover the days lost because of the problems that came with Covid-19,”

Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga

The Basic Education Department’s director-general Mathanzima Mweli said the scrapping of school holidays was not set in stone and was merely a recommendation that had been made.

The department has already sounded the alarm at the rate at which classroom time has been lost due to the COVID-19 and has warned of the consequences, should the situation continue.

“We have now begun to measure COVID-19 related learning losses in South Africa by comparing how much children learned in 2020 with how much they learned in a normal school year before that. These measures indicate that between 50% and 75% of a normal year’s worth of learning was lost during 2020,” said Dr Stephen Taylor, Director for Research at the department.