article · South African Journal of Education
South African secondary school educators face notable difficulties when delivering the national Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement, particularly within life sciences education. This qualitative investigation examined the barriers caused by limited physical resources and educational capacity in rural public schools across a sub-district in the Northwest province. Focusing on educators teaching Grades 10 to 12, the research gathered insights through individual and focus-group interviews. The collected evidence highlights that the essential resource requirements of teachers are routinely unfulfilled, preventing them from meeting the policy demands of the national curriculum. To address poor learner performance and empower educators, the findings emphasise the necessity of targeted provisioning by educational authorities. Meeting these basic infrastructural and instructional material requirements is identified as a critical condition for facilitating effective curriculum delivery in rural science classrooms.
When schools lack fundamental educational resources, teachers struggle to deliver science curricula effectively, which negatively affects learner outcomes. Highlighting the everyday shortages experienced in rural classrooms provides clear evidence for policymakers and educational authorities to direct infrastructure funding and teaching materials where they are needed most.
The abstract does not indicate an application pathway or commercialisation potential, as it focuses strictly on policy implementation and public school resource constraints.
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South African teachers experience challenges with the implementation of the national school curriculum – the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). In this regard, teachers may not feel empowered to effectively deal with the demands of the current educational policy. Concerns have been expressed about learners’ poor performance in schools and the school infrastructure coupled with educational capacity emerged to be a possible contributing factor. In the study reported on here we focused on the challenges experienced by South African life sciences teachers in the implementation of CAPS caused by limited resources. The context of the study was secondary schools in 1 sub-district in the Northwest province that offered life sciences (LS) in Grades 10 to 12. A qualitative research approach was followed and 10 teachers from rural public schools who taught LS in Grades 10 to 12 during the period of this study were purposefully selected. For data generation, we used audio recordings from individual and focus-group interviews. The findings indicate that teachers’ needs in terms of resources to effectively implement CAPS are often not catered for. It is recommended that adequate teaching and learning resources for effective implementation of CAPS should be provided. The Department of Education’s prioritisation of teachers’ needs will engender effective curriculum implementation.
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DOI: 10.15700/saje.v44n2a2387
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