By Lee-Yandra Paulsen
The National Policy for Determining School Calendars for Public Schools in South Africa has been revised, and the Department of Basic Education has published the proposed changes for public comment.
The proposed changes attempt to give the Minister of Education and the department more flexibility in deciding the open and close dates of each term and to mitigate differences between coastal and inland schools. The changes are being made following the three years of school disruptions brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The proposed changes include:
• The Fourth school term should end the first week of December instead of the second week.
• Removal of specific months when terms should end. This is for flexibility.
• Integrate public holidays better.
• Allowing more religious holidays for minority learners. (As previously learners were only allowed two days)
• Allowing the announcements and distribution of approved changes via social media (before, this was only permitted in newspapers)
• Allowing for rapid deviations in response to emergencies or extreme circumstances
The department plans to remove the staggering school calendars where coastal schools start the new year one week later than inland schools while coastal schools have a shorter holiday for the first term. By 2025 and 2026 the department plans to have both regions begin and end school at the same time.
The department of Basic Education stated that it does not want to eliminate the staggering calendar, as it will have an indirect effect on tourism, road safety and traffic.
The Department said that the goal is to assign different dates to the two clusters in the first term so that traffic density is kept within acceptable levels before the start of schools for the new school year.
According to reports despite this, the policy stipulates that each cluster’s holiday schedule must be reasonably constant to facilitate short- to medium-term planning for everyone involved in education, including those who aren’t directly involved in it like the tourism industry, the public, the private sector, the authorities in charge of traffic, parents, and students.
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