Only 400 out of 38 000 schools in SA are teaching IT as a high school subject, says Fiona Wallace, head of .co.za Cares – the corporate social investment arm of Uniforum, the .co.za domain name administrator.
Speaking to ITWeb at the start of the e-Schools Network Innovate 2010 conference, in Cape Town, Wallace said her numbers are based on requests from schools needing study material to teach IT as a subject.
“From our numbers we can guess that there are no more than 16 000 learners, at the most, being taught IT as a subject in any year,” she noted.
Just how many schools, teachers and learners there are in the country is a point of some dispute. The national Department of Education has said in the past that there are about 28 000 schools; however, provincial departments manage schools and their numbers are higher.
Wikipedia states there are about 38 000 schools, 386 000 teachers and 13 million learners in SA.
Wallace explained that.co.za Cares has put together a pack of learning materials to teach IT in high schools. This pack includes textbooks, interactive materials and CDs. All the materials are based on the 2005 Outcomes-Based Education curriculum.
“We went to each province and asked them to tell us how many of these packs we should produce and they sent us the lists. However, we have found that quite a few of the schools they said were teaching IT have dropped it as a subject.”
