The core curriculum will be the focus of teaching for grades 7 and 12 when pupils return to school on 1 June, according to basic education minister Angie Motshekga.
Pupils will be required to sanitise and wear masks.
Basic education deputy minister Reginah Mhaule said parents were free to decide to keep children at home if they felt sending them to school would be too risky. In this case, they would have to home school their children.
The final matric exams have already been set, so the curriculum cannot be trimmed.
Dates for matric exams will be released in due course. A new school calendar will be gazetted soon.
Motshekga said all curriculum enrichment programmes would be put on hold.
‘The amount of time available in a school day will determine the duration of the period by subject. We will be using innovative methods about how we meet health, safety, social or physical distancing requirements. The trimmed curriculum will be sent to school for planning purposes.’
School nutrition programmes would also resume on 1 June.
Gauteng Premier David Makhura said the entire province would move to a level 3 lockdown at the beginning of June.
Answering questions during a virtual session of the Gauteng provincial legislature, he said that, as the province’s districts were highly integrated, it was not feasible to ‘go to level 3 in a disjoined way (with) one metro in level 4, another in level 3 and another at level 2’.
United Nations (UN) Secretary General António Guterres yesterday endorsed South Africa’s anti-covid measures as ‘strong’ and ‘necessary’.
He said in an TV interview with SABC News: ‘One thing is clear – there is no real contradiction between measures taken to prevent the disease and economic recovery. If we let the disease spread, no economic recovery will be possible.’
He added: ‘I hope the population will have patience and I hope the government will progressively find the ways to, in a very smart and targeted way, progressively re-open society and the economy to minimise the social and economic impact of Covid.’
In other virus-related news
- President Donald Trump threatened to permanently freeze United States funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO) unless ‘substantive improvements’ were made within the next 30 days. Washington suspended payments to the WHO in mid-April, accusing it of being too close to Beijing and covering up and mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic. Trump this week tweeted images of a letter he sent to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying the letter was ‘self-explanatory’;
- Jobless benefit claims in the United Kingdom rose almost 70% in April, with 2.1 million people putting in claims to compensate for earnings lost to measures aimed at curbing the pandemic; and
- Positive cases in India reached 100 000 on Tuesday, one day after the extension of the lockdown. The rate of infections has shown no sign of slowing.