Christel House South Africa recently employed 28 additional tutors to assist our students in both our Junior and High School with remedial teaching until the end of 2021. Given the many disruptions to the academic calendar because of COVID-19, the goal is to make up for the learning loss that took place and to focus specifically on subjects that require additional attention like Mathematics and Science.
During the lockdown, our students continued to learn from home; our Junior School students using workbooks and our High School students using donated tablets and data to Zoom into their classes. We were particularly proud of our Grade 12 students who achieved a 100% pass rate during such a challenging year. However, despite all the innovative practices we put into place to help our students learning from home, valuable face-to-face teaching contact was lost.
The broader fallout of lockdown in high density communities such as lack of food, increased job losses and the trauma brought on by the fallout of the uncertainty, impacted our learners heavily. In addition, bouncing from classroom learning to remote learning also put a strain on our learners.
The tutoring programme has been embedded into our teaching programme, where learners receive daily tutoring in groups of three learners per session for 40 minutes. The key subjects that are tutored on are Mathematics and English.
“Younger children have suffered the most significant learning loss during 2020 due to the pandemic. We are grateful for the opportunity to accelerate learning through our high dosage tutor program. We have a highly motivated team of qualified tutors to work with small groups of learners daily and our tutors are following the Gap Curriculum programme, created by our teachers at the end of last year,” says Carol Kriel, Junior School Principal at Christel House SA.
The tutor programme is currently being modified based on the feedback received from tutors, teachers, and learners. Our Junior School tutors have reported an average of 20-40% improvement for the subjects, Mathematics and English after a month of intervention.