The Ministry's National Director of Planning and Cooperation, Manuel Rego, told AIM that this looming crisis results from a shortage of schools and of teachers to absorb all the pupils who will graduate from seventh grade, the final grade in primary schools.
The projection for 2008 is that 121,000 pupils will enter eighth grade, the starting point for secondary education. This year, all of the first cycle of secondary education (grades eight to ten) contains 309,600 pupils.
"Investment in secondary education has tripled in recent years", said Rego, "but this growth is insufficient to absorb all the pupils graduating from seventh grade".
As for the teachers, Rego admitted that they are seriously under-qualified. Most teachers in secondary schools only possess sufficient training to teach in primary education.
As for the second cycle of secondary education, the pre- university 11th and 12th grades, the plan is that, in 2008, these will cater for 56,000 pupils rather than the current figure of 47,000.
Lack of space, and inadequately trained teachers take a heavy toll: these factors are blamed for the high failure rates at the end of 10th and 12th grades. Thus in 2006, 26 per cent of pupils studying for first cycle secondary education on day courses failed. The heaviest failure rate was in 10th grade.
For 11th and 12th grades, the failure rate was somewhat lower, at 23 per cent.
The Ministry does not predict such a serious shortage of places in primary education in 2008. This partly because of the school building programme, and partly because higher pass rates than in the past mean that fewer pupils are clogging up the system by repeating years.
Nonetheless the expected enrolment of over a million new pupils in first grade in 2008 will certainly pose a challenge.
In the entire school system, it is forecast that there will be 5.8 million pupils, an increase of 13.6 per cent on this year's figure.
Rego said that, to accommodate this increase, about 1,400 classrooms are under construction, and 14,000 new teachers will be hired in 2008. Currently the Mozambican school system, taken as a whole, employs about 70,000 teachers.
It is hoped that the increased recruitment of teachers will reduce the pupil-teacher ratio from the current 72 to one, to 68 to one, leading to an improvement in the quality od education.
SOURCE: AIM
