SOWETAN | Covid no excuse to fail our kids

It's been three years since Covid-19 broke out around the globe and wreaked untold havoc, so much so that it would well nigh impossible to revert life to "factory settings" as we used to know it pre-2019.

Such has been the impact of the coronavirus first detected in Wuhan, China, that many economies around the globe are feeling its impact and will do so for a foreseeable time to come.

In just over two months' time it will be exactly three years to the day SA was placed under a complete lockdown. The move affected everyday aspect of life for all of us, least of all schooling and the education system at large. Since the gradual and eventual total lifting of the lockdown, the mantra has been the quest to rebuild and normalise life the best we can.

Teaching and learning in our school has, largely, normalised and therefore every other aspect linked to it must be synchronised to a normalising society, despite many of the problems besetting SA today.

However, that seems to be something that has escaped those running our education or at least the National Senior Certificate, which is the culmination of every pupil's journey in the system. This week, quality assurer Umalusi announced that it has cleared the 2022 results and that they would be duly released on Thursday.

Big as it is, the announcement of matric result is all but another step in the lives of a section of a generation that will one day carry this country. And to keep in abeyance the immediate plans of nearly a million people and use what has become a convenient excuse, Covid-19, is unjustifiable in our book.

In the past pupils would by now know how they have fared in the final year at school and have in some instances already started with the academic calendar in their next phase of education and vocational training.

Experience has taught us that the release of the results will be followed by another unmitigated frenzy, with matriculants seeking to secure space at institutions of higher learning. It is almost guaranteed that more time will be lost with the kind of problems we collectively have no excuse to witness year in, year out.

Covid-19 bequeathed our education system more problems that we have no business normalising. The excuse therefore that the extra-long wait was unavoidable cannot stand. The question: is what is being done now to ensure that the situation is returned to the pre-Covid normal? 

We owe it to our children.