Inclusive education has always been generally defined as a way to ensure that all learners are able to access and gain equal opportunities to education and learning without any form of exclusion. In the South African education perspective, the emphasis on inclusive education mainly evolves around accommodation of those experiencing learning barriers, especially the learners living with disabilities and faced with special needs to access the educational opportunities. This concept also seeks to ensure that access to education is ensured without prejudice against race, religion, physical abilities, sexual orientation etc.
Raising the issue of inclusive curriculum, which many would think is already within the concept of inclusive education, would sound amiss. However, inclusive curriculum is overshadowed by the term “inclusive education”. Within inclusive education, inclusive curriculum has been overlooked and was, arguably, never appropriately examined. Perhaps the introduction to the inclusive curriculum will help better understand what inclusive education exactly entails besides the mere accommodation of all learners in education and learning without discrimination of any sort in the mainstream education institutions.
Inclusive curriculum refers to the curriculum deliberately designed to accommodate learners in accordance with their diverse individualistic academic capabilities and strengths. This concept seeks to protect academic dignity of all learners irrespective of how much academic pressure they can handle from different subjects. The concept further seeks to educate learners that there are many routes to academic success. Academic inclusive curriculum looks to accommodate learners to do subjects relevant to what they wish to achieve as goals in life. This concept is advocating for personal relavant curricular that meets the individualistic traits of every child as opposed to the curricular that imposes itself onto learners and force them to pursue subjects irrelevant from their future desires.
Under the current curriculum system in South Africa (NCS) learners who cannot or struggle with the so called “core subjects”, Maths, Physics and Languages are automatically excluded for academic success. Even the parents automatically connotes the child’s failure to master these “core subjects” to academic meltdown. This negative connotation travels to an extent that parents lose hope and find private tutors or learning centres to force a child to master Maths, Physics and English. These attempts by parents are understandably justified because the South African education curriculum system is designed and centered around the promotion and mastering of these “core subjects”. The narrative is also that without these “core subjects” there’s no future for a child. Thus, parents make means to eliminate such potential threats towards their children’s future.
A learner mastering the “core subjects” is deemed of a higher academic class than other learners who struggle. This could be blamed on the education system of South Africa that continuously fails to academically ensure inclusive curriculum established to accomodate all educational needs of all learners in their academic uniqueness.
Lack of inclusive curriculum within the education system of South Africa has resulted in many instances of academic exclusions. Car guards, street loiterers, vendors, cashiers, bartenders and the likes are people who were told they need Maths, physics, English etc. to academically succeed and ultimately lead a meaningful life in the future. As a result some dropped out of school upon realization of lack of mastering these “core subjects”. Others failed their Matric year and were discouraged to go back and re-write, while those who did re-write still couldn’t meet the desired requirements to pass. All these events are blamed onto an education system (NCS) that lacks informed understanding of the importance of academic inclusive curriculum.
In dealing with curriculum matters in the UK, the Govt White Paper (2010) in England, London, clearly indicated that children who have little interest or ability in the so called “core subjects” (Maths, Physics, English or languages etc) will continue to be failed academically, feel a lack of self-efficacy and will continue to be disenchanted with education.
This is evident in relation to the curriculum issues of South Africa. The current curriculum system (NCS) is inflexible, learners have to alter themselves to accommodate the curriculum and this signifies how reversed south African education system is – curriculum studies argue that the curriculum system has to serve the nation, meet the educational needs of learners and deliver on their demands. In South Africa the curriculum system demands and the nation delivers.
Despite a revolutionary breakout of new careers in the job market and the re-definition of other careers, the SAs education system, through the NCS, continues to leg behind times of the world’s education systems to accommodate new developments to ensure relevancy by providing a curriculum of the 21st century, relevant to the generation of the time. Athletic and sports driven learners are normally unable to master the so called “core subjects”, this automatically means their life progress is dampened as it is embedded on academic success they can’t achieve. A relevant education system would design and establish a curriculum that allows introduction of Schools of Sports to accommodate learners of such ability in order to ensure that they also have a future (how will these schools of sports be managed?):https://simnandisolutions.co.za/2020/07/06/sports-education-talented-learners-future-destroyed/.
In essence, that is the meaning of inclusive curriculum that should be existing within the narrative of “inclusive education”.
It is with such observations and concerns that the Simnandi education private group developed a Personalized Education Curriculum System (PECS). PECS seeks to reverse the current curriculum irrelevancy into curriculum relevancy. The PECS is designed to save learners from the monstrous curriculum that forces them to undertake subjects they won’t need in the future. PECS is a transformative education curriculum system that, through its nature of design, will put an end to the whole confusion around curriculum debates. PECS will further sort out the pass requirement standards once and for all. PECS seeks to bring back the value and the dignity of our education system. PECS ensures that learners taste the glimpse of the workplace experience while still at school. That’s what makes our curriculum unique and highly relevant to inspire the education community of our nation, South Africa and the whole of Africa. And that is how we believe the education system can be fixed.
Know more about PECS: https://simnandisolutions.co.za/personalized-education/ – Click on PECS Powerpoint presentation.
Please answer these 3 questions and submit: https://simnandisolutions.co.za/pecs-questionnaires/