Buffalo City teachers believe the 2024-2025 curriculum will see the Eastern Cape department of education play an important role in alleviating youth unemployment but for this to succeed, schools need to be empowered to include innovation and digital technology into their classrooms.
ECDoE said one of its main goals in the seventh administration was to play a proactive role in alleviating youth unemployment, which would see the inclusion of scarce skills sectors into the curriculum.
Education MEC Fundile Gade said the province had potential in the automotive, maritime and agriculture sectors and pupils needed to be redirected towards these sectors.
Gade said: “If we are importing skills from overseas for these sectors then that is an indictment of our education system.”
Speaking at the annual Innovate and Inspire Teachers Conference on July 8, organiser Kelly Bush said that the 2024-2025 curriculum focused on problem solving, computational thinking and communication which would make schools central to facilitating the development of a future workforce that created jobs, solved problems, and adapted to emerging job markets.
Fellow teachers at the conference agreed but cautioned that this may not be achieved if the basics continued to be neglected, such as internet access.
St Joseph’s College and Prep teacher Johan Rich said teaching needed to adapt from passing on information towards creating pupils who thought critically and creatively and that cheaper data for schools would enable this.
Hudson Park Primary grade 5 teacher Amy O’Kennedy said many families could not afford to buy tablets or chrome books which presented a barrier towards creating pupils who were proficient in internet basics.
Beaconhurst School teacher Caitlin Geddie said before the curriculum could address unemployment, it needed to tackle misconceptions about technology.
She said: “The jobs the children are going into now are all digital, but teachers are still getting stuck in the pen and paper methodology. The children do not use dictionaries anymore however the CAPS curriculum prescribes that we teach the children how to use dictionaries as opposed to showing them how to use spellcheck on the computer.”
Regional manager for 2Simple, an educational software organisation, Tim Holliday said intensified efforts to drive children towards coding and robotics would not entirely address the unemployment crises if children were not first empowered with the basics such as typing, using servers, cloud storage and Microsoft 360.
He said: “Not everyone needs to be a programmer when there is a wide range of jobs available right now that just require emphasis on Word and Excel.
“Coding and robotics are good marketing for a government but what will you be able to show for it in five years? Adding typing skills to the curriculum has an immediate measurable outcome.”
Sponsored by Snapplify and 2Simple, this year’s conference was attended by 150 teachers and empowered educators with knowledge on AI tools, coding, Canva and inclusive education.