10 Year Basic Education Essay

In order to best understand the way in which Basic Education is managed in Botswana, one first needs to be cognisant of the expectations of the Botswana Government as expressed in the Foreword of all the syllabi that are generated by the Department of Curriculum Development and Evaluation, a section of the Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MOESD). The primary school syllabi are part of the Ten Year Basic Education Programme (1995), as a response to the Revised National Policy on Education (RNPE, 1994), a document that, 20 years later, still resonates as a key determinant of which direction education should be going in, though somewhat superseded by the Botswana Education for All – National Action Plan of 2002 (EFA – ENA, 2002). Thus the plan is laid out by the MOESD, and the school has only to follow the programme ‘as given’. In the words of Moswela (2014), ‘the

Some (private) schools choose not to follow the PSLE syllabus at all, but to opt for other curricula such as the Cambridge Primary Curriculum and the IB PYP (International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme). However where students at the end of their primary school years do not sit the local examinations they become automatically excluded from the MOESD Secondary school system – a prerequisite is to have sat the PSLExaminations in order to progress to the Junior Primary phase.

The Junior Primary syllabus is in the hands of the team of teachers in this section of the school that I find myself leading. It is loosely based on the Curriculum blueprint: ten years basic education programme (Ibid.). It has been tweaked and adjusted over the years, but with the imminemt introduction of IT equipment into the classrooms, such as tablets and interactive boards, there is a feeling that it needs to be interrogated and updated to meet the needs of the ‘Selfie