Build One South Africa (BOSA) today launches a nationwide accountability campaign, “Where Are They Now?”, to expose the full scale of South Africa’s school dropout crisis. The aim is to challenge the Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, to account for the hundreds of thousands of young people who never made it to final exams room to write matric.
This year, around 715,000 learners are registered to write their matric exams. But when this same cohort started school in Grade 1 in 2014, there were over 1.1 million enrolled. It is chilling that approximately 450 000 learners have disappeared from the system before even reaching their final year.
These are the children whose stories don’t make it into glossy press releases about pass rates or top achievers. They are the children who dropped out because of hunger, pregnancy, violence, poverty, or sheer disillusionment with a substandard education system. They are South Africa’s forgotten generation and they deserve answers.
“We cannot celebrate a 30% pass mark while ignoring the 50% of learners who never even make it to matric,” said BOSA Leader Mmusi Maimane. “Every year, hundreds of thousands of children disappear from our schools, and government doesn’t even bother to track them.”
We must stop talking about dropouts as if they are the ones who gave up,” said BOSA Leader Mmusi Maimane. “The truth is that our government has given up on them. Schools which are overcrowded, underfunded, unsafe, and unsupported push learners out. The Minister owes the nation an honest account of how the system is failing our children.”
BOSA will be raising this directly with Minister Gwarube in Parliament next week Tuesday when she appears for oral questions.
To address this, urgent interventions are both available and implemented. These include reducing class sizes and improving teacher support; providing psychosocial and nutritional support to learners at risk; investing in school safety and affordable transport; and ending budget cuts to education.
BOSA is calling on Minister Siviwe Gwarube and the Department of Basic Education to:
- Publish annual dropout data by province, gender, and grade level
- Establish a national learner tracking system to follow every child from Grade 1 to 12
- Table a plan to reintegrate learners who have fallen out of the system as early as possible
As part of the “Where Are They Now?” campaign, BOSA will collect and share real stories from young people who dropped out along the way. This includes those who left school to care for siblings, those who couldn’t afford transport, and those failed by unsafe schools or overcrowded classrooms.
South Africa’s education system cannot be judged solely by how many learners write matric. It must also be judged by how many never get there. It is only when we create an environment where every South African child has equitable access to quality education, that we pave the way for a prosperous and thriving nation.
Media Enquiries:
Roger Solomons
BOSA Spokesperson
072 299 3551