Johannesburg – Education stakeholder and teachers’ union are heading to court to challenge Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga’s decision to get matric learners to rewrite the exam papers that were leaked.
Motshekga announced last week that due to the Maths Paper 2 and Physical Science Paper 2 being leaked, pupils throughout the country will need to rewrite them.
The decision has not sat well with teacher unions saying they would be filing an urgent court interdict to reverse the decision on Monday.
The South African Democratic Teachers’ Union’s (Sadtu) Nomusa Cembi has labelled the move as premature.
“We will be applying for an urgent court interdict on the decision of the department to make all the learners rewrite these two papers. We feel that this decision is unfair and premature.”
The National Professional Teacher’s Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa) has urged the department and law enforcement agencies to finalise the investigation into the leaks in order to spare thousands of matriculants from having to rewrite the papers.
Basil Manuel of Naptosa said: “At the moment, they are telling us there about 200,000 pupils who accessed the paper. However, we must not now say that over 400,000 pupils accessed the paper. We are saying, investigate properly, but do not punish the NSC.”
However, the Department of Basic Education said it was ready to challenge the unions in court.
The department’s spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga said: “Those that have announced that they will take the department to court, we will wait for them and see what happens.”
Mathematics Paper 2 will be written on 15 December and the Physical Science Paper 2 days later.
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