The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has extended learning time in primary schools effective September 5 in the 2016\/2017 school calendar.<\/p>\n
According to a statement released by the Ministry, these changes are part of the efforts by government to improve learning of students in primary schools in line with Section 72 of the Education Act of 2013.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a long time now the school day in public primary schools in Malawi has been the shortest in this region of Africa, thereby contributing to the poor achievement of our students in comparison with students in the countries of the region,\u201d reads part of the statement.<\/p>\n
The ministry further appealed to all education institutions, stakeholders and the general public to be committed in providing their support to ensure that the policy is followed.<\/p>\n
From September 5, scholars in standard 1 will be knocking off at 10:40am, those in standard 2 will be knocking off at 11:30am, students in standard 3 and 4 will be finishing lessons at 12:20am and those from standard 5 to 8 will be going home at 13:40pm.<\/p>\n
Reacting to the changes, education expert, Steve Sharra said the benefits of the changes will depend on the implementation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe change can increase contact time between students and teachers and also give teachers more time to uncover more subject matter content. But that will depend on the implementation. Those that will be adding more time beyond noon need to be fed. They can either bring food or the school can feed them. Children cannot learn anything meaningfully on an empty stomach\u201d, said Sharra.<\/p>\n
Sharra added that the students also need comfortable conditions to spend several hours learning and that teachers need to own this change and provide meaningful direction for it.<\/p>\n
He cited good desks, good toilets and a variety of pedagogical activities to maintain interest and motivation as examples of those conditions, saying that if these conditions are not met, the change will not achieve much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has extended learning time in primary schools effective September 5 in the 2016\/2017 school calendar. According to a statement released by the Ministry, these changes are part of the efforts by government to improve learning of students in primary schools in line with Section 72 of the Education […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":26075,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26076,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26071\/revisions\/26076"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}