Fifty deserving high-school students will win a second chance to improve their National Senior Certificate (NSC) marks so they can gain access to university education thanks to a generous donation made by the Eskom Development Fund to an innovative programme run by the Stellenbosch University Centre for Pedagogy (SUNCEP).
The students, who will be selected from more than 800 high-school pupils with educationally disadvantaged backgrounds who apply for the opportunity across the country each year, will be accommodated, provided with two meals a day and enrolled on the Science and Mathematics at Stellenbosch University (SciMathUS) programme.
Joining about 50 others on the one-year programme, the Eskom-funded students will receive training so that they can fulfil their academic dreams, which may have been denied due to hardship at home and school. The goal is to help them to retake their NSC examinations in Mathematics and Physical Science or Accounting, enabling them to enter university.
The SciMathUS programme, which is presented in Afrikaans and English, adopts an active learning approach in which students take responsibility for their own educational development – acquiring reasoning, interpersonal and problem-solving skills as part of an academic literacy course.
Since its inception in 2001, the programme has helped more than 1,100 students to improve their Grade 12 marks in Mathematics and Physical Science by an average of 15 percentage points and put them on the path to gaining undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications and fulfilling careers. SciMathUS’s alumni have included medical doctors, physiotherapists, speech therapists, teachers, engineers, agriculturists, accountants, food scientists and academics.
Eskom’s support, which started in 2013, also extends to offering work placements to many of the programme’s former students who are accepted to study engineering at university and, upon graduation, jobs at the national power utility.
The SciMathUS programme offers two streams – Science and Accounting – for applicants who must have recently taken their NSCs and achieved a minimum mark in the subjects they wish to improve. Those who qualify for the Science stream are supported in redoing two core subjects, Mathematics and Physics. Those who enter Accounting rewrite the NSC in Mathematics only, while also taking introductory modules in either Accounting or Economics which are assessed by the university as part of an extended degree programme in its Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. All students also undertake complimentary subjects which include Academic Literacy and Computer Literacy.
The synergy between the programme and Maties extends beyond the structural and pedagogic support offered during the course itself – 75% of the students who complete the year subsequently enroll as undergraduates at Stellenbosch University, with most of the others joining different higher education institutions.
“Once they come to Stellenbosch University, they experience the hype and buzz of student life – while others prefer to study closer to home,” says SciMathUS Programme Manager Nokwanda Siyengo.
Whatever the students’ individual preferences, SciMathUS offers a holistic approach to personal and educational development which seeks to nurture confidence and talent. The programme aims to empower its alumni as individuals and access higher education and the formal economy by helping them to make informed career choices.
Data on the academic achievements of former SciMathUS students at Maties indicates the scale of the programme’s success. More than 200 obtained degrees at Stellenbosch University between 2005 and 2017, of whom 45 obtained a second qualification (degree or diploma) at Maties. More than 10 of these students went on to win a third qualification and two were awarded doctorates.
In its quest for inclusivity, catering to all educationally disadvantaged South African students, SciMathUS has established a national footprint, says Nokwanda Siyengo. It has also identified great need for the kinds of bridging training and empowerment that if offers, both from potential employers, such as Eskom, and from potential students.
In fact, the capacity of the programme is capped by the amount of pooled funding received and the number of students trained has tended to fluctuate, starting with about 42 in the first year, and rising to 125, before settling at the present level of about 100 students a year.
“The environment in which we work is shaped by our dependence on soft funding in a fast-moving corporate world,” explains SUNCEP Director Trevor van Louw, “If we get more funding, we can cater to more students.”
The number of deserving, educationally disadvantaged pupils who cannot gain entry to university means you could have a SciMathUS with as many as 1,000 students, says van Louw, who views the programme as part of a larger, national discussion on the problem of access to higher education.
