The tension between curriculum coverage and quality learning: The experiences of South African teachers

In South Africa, there is increasing state monitoring of curriculum coverage. This is a response both to classroom research which shows that teachers do not always cover the official curriculum in the specified year and to learners’ poor achievement in international tests. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal from 2013 to 2016, the provincial department of education embarked on a systemic reform programme called Jika iMfundo in 1200 schools, which is focused on improving curriculum management and coverage. We interviewed 29 Heads of Department (who are also teachers) in fifteen schools who had participated in the Jika iMfundo programme for these three years, asking them about their experiences. The findings show that teachers experience tension between the fast pace required by the curriculum trackers and slow pace of learners and they believe that increasing pacing to cover the curriculum hampers the quality of the learning. Teachers also said that the curriculum coverage trackers do not account for different school contexts. We argue that while the programme has provided clear curriculum guidance to teachers who need it, it has not sufficiently acknowledged the huge variation in learners’ competence. Nor has it yet enabled teachers to develop the content knowledge and the pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach learners who are not at the same grade level (although they are in the same classroom). Curriculum coverage is a necessary, but not sufficient intervention, unless there is also a focus on pedagogy and teaching at the right level. We recommend an intervention that enables teachers to identify individual learner’s existing learning gaps, and equips them to teach at the right level in order to provide learners with opportunities to develop foundational knowledge and skills to succeed in further education, rather than one whose primary focus is only curriculum coverage.