Arone concerned that girls outshine boys
Ookeditse Malesela | Friday December 14, 2018 13:20
Addressing Parliament, Arone said this has persisted over the years, and this year was no different. He said this when delivering a statement on the PSLE results Wednesday. The results, which were released last week, showed an improvement.
They proved that the girl child continued to outperform the boy child in all the subjects.
Although the Minister indicated that he was happy with the improvement, despite troubles in the education sector, he said there was a need to see the genders competing equally.
This, he said, would give Botswana a balanced society of excelling males and females in the future. “Madam Speaker, I am worried by the continuing fact where the girl child continues to out-perform the boy child in all subjects in the above cited years. Whilst we celebrate that the girl child in Botswana is doing very well, equally we wish to see the opposite gender competing equally well with their counterpart in order to have a balanced society in future.”
He said a total of 46, 432 candidates set for the 2018 PSLE and 23, 425 of these candidates were female while 23, 007 were male.
He said it was encouraging that the PSLE results have been improving steadily for the past years from 69% in 2014 to the current 72.78%.
“Nevertheless, I invite Honourable Members of Parliament to join me as we celebrate continuing improvement in PSLE results,” he added.
Performance at grade A increased by 2.15 percent from 17.11% in 2017 to 19.14% in 2018. Percentage of candidates who obtained grade B has also slightly improved by 0.36% from 18.78% last year to 19.14% in 2018. Candidates at grade C declined by 1.35 percent from 35.73% in 2017 to 34.38 of this year. Cumulative, there is an increase of 1.16 percent of credit pass grades (A-C) having 72.78% compared to 71.62% of last year.
At regional level, South East tops the nine regions with 83.98% followed by North East with 83.39% and Chobe with 77.71%. The least performing region is Ghanzi at 52.37%, but the most improving from 46.30% that was recorded in 2017.
The Minister further told Parliament that they have set the target that all regions go above 50% from the beginning of this year and they are pushing the bar higher for the next year.
“For us, this is a notable achievement and cause for appreciation that our teachers are doing something positive. We will continue to drive towards producing quality results at all levels of the basic education through implementation of practical and vigorous initiatives,” said Arone.