RE: Poor student performance at UCT Online High School
I'm writing to you concerning a story Daily Maverick intends to run about
allegations of poor student performance at UCT Online High School and a lack of
transparency from the school over proposed restructuring in 2023.
Please see the questions below:
1.) In total, how many learners were enrolled at UCT Online High School at the
start of the 2022 academic year, in January?
5,507 learners have enrolled since our school opened in January of this year.
1.1.) How many pupils are currently enrolled as of 29 November 2022?
We have 4,483 currently enrolled learners.
1.2.) What is UCT Online High School’s dropout rate? Please give percentages as
well as actual Numbers?
The retention rate for our learners through the 2022 school year has been 81%.
Only 5% of those who have withdrawn stated academic dissatisfaction as their primary
reason for leaving the school. The majority of learners who withdrew during 2022 (60%
of those who left) did so because they felt either that online schooling was not right for
them or because they had found it difficult to adapt to the online learning environment.
Within this group, explanations included the difficulty of keeping motivated while working
online and the need for close learner supervision and one-to-one guidance. Some
learners in this category also left because we have introduced a more structured term
system and they had wanted the freedom to set their own pace throughout the school
year. A further 14% of those who withdrew were accepted into a different school, and
the remaining 21% are distributed among smaller categories such as socio-emotional
reasons, home environment and not disclosed.
1.3) How many applications has UCT Online High School received for the 2023
academic year?
We are experiencing a steady and sustained interest in enrolments for the 2023 school
year. It is still too early to predict how many of these will lead to confirmed enrolments.
1.4) Who are UCT Online High Schools’ funders?
Our school is primarily funded by the monthly tuition fees paid by our parents and
guardians. In order to ensure that we can provide access to education to middle and low
income families we have set our fees well below the fees charged by other private
schools, and also below the additional fees charged by many state schools. To make
this possible we have sought, and obtained, financial support from philanthropic
organisations, private sector bursary funds and socially responsible investors. We do
not receive any public sector funding or financial support.
Marking:
An article published in City Press suggests that the school has about 600 staff
members – a third of them teachers, a third of them support coaches and another
third who mark papers. However, information contained in the Learner Handbook
available on UCT Online High School’s website provides that: “UCT Online High
School does not mark examinations for subjects and programmes. Unless
stipulated otherwise, all examinations are marked by the examination body for
the subjects and programme a learner is enrolled for.”
Our Academic Handbook, which is available to all learners, parents and guardians,
clearly specifies which examinations are internal and which are external. As with all
other schools, external examinations are not set or marked by us, and are overseen by
SACAI, our accrediting body.
It is our understanding that UCT Online High School outsources the marking of
assessments and examinations to an external third-party company – the private
tutoring company, Teach Me 2. It is claimed that UCT Online High School did not
inform guardians that Teach Me 2 were the markers. It is also claimed that after
queries from guardians began to surface as early as February about the nature
and quality of the marking, the school was not transparent with guardians, and
instructed its staff not to inform them that Teach Me 2 were the markers.
2.) What is the school’s response to the above allegations?
2.1) Why has the school repeatedly kept mum about outsourcing the marking to
Teach Me 2?
We work with a number of partner organisations in providing the full array of services
that are essential for providing quality teaching and learning online and at scale. These
include Teach Me 2, which engages and trains our first-level markers for internally-
assessed tests and assessments that cannot be automated. Following this initial
marking stage, all first-level assessments are returned to us, are reviewed, and a
proportion are moderated by our fully-qualified teachers. All end-of-year examinations
are graded by qualified teachers. In this, our system of assessment is analogous to the
systems used by universities, where first year assignments are graded by graduate
teaching assistants and then moderated by Faculty. This is not a third-party outsourced
arrangement, as alleged. We conduct all aspects of moderation ourselves, and this
includes investigating all apparent inconsistencies, and technical and administrative
errors.
Daily Maverick has been reliably informed by staff and guardians that the quality
of the marking is appalling. We understand that this is an issue which has
consistently been raised to management by both guardians and staff.
2.2) Why has UCT Online High School continued to outsource its marking to
Teach Me 2, even after it received backlash?
Comprehensive quality assurance processes have been put in place as a part of our
standard workflow with Teach Me 2. Markers who are assigned scripts use marking
guides developed and moderated by our staff. In addition to this, there are moderation
processes for learners, guardians and staff to query a grade. We have also released our
Term 1 and 3 Cycle tests and Term 2 exams, along with their memos, to afford learners
and guardians an opportunity to review their scripts in preparation for end-of-year
exams. This is not unusual in other schools, where a teacher, learner or guardian may
review a script and identify marking queries that they would like to raise. These internal
quality assurance processes are in addition to moderation processes, as regulated by
SACAI, our accreditation body. It is the case that a comparatively small number of
parents and guardians have raised concerns about the specific grades awarded to their
learners, as is their right. In some cases we identified administrative errors, which were
corrected. In other cases, the mark allocated proved to be appropriate, either because
the learner had not uploaded the examination script to our platform, or because they
had not done sufficient work to pass the examination.
It can be argued that a large part of teaching is marking children’s work to get a
sense of where they are and where they struggle. Additionally, we understand
that one does not need to be a qualified teacher to tutor at Teach Me 2.
2.3) Why did UCT Online High School decide to outsource the marking to Teach
Me 2 specifically, instead of having its own teachers mark the student’s work?
We agree - of course! - that an important part of teaching is marking and giving
feedback. This is why it was important for us to provide a scalable solution for our
learners. While first-level marking is conducted by Teach Me 2, our teachers have
access to all learner submissions and grades through a range of real-time dashboards
and via our online campus, allowing interventions where required. Teach Me 2 also
offers a tutoring service; we do not use this service and all our tutoring is provided by
our own qualified practitioners. Our use of first-level markers provides the opportunity
for our teachers to spend their time engaging in high impact learning interventions, such
as Ask Me Anything sessions.
This line of questioning speaks to a broader point that we’ve considered very carefully
at UCT Online High School - what is the role of a teacher, and how do we scale good
teaching effectively in South Africa?
There is already a chronic shortage of teachers in South Africa, and with an additional
43% of the country’s teachers retiring in the next 10 years, the teacher shortage crisis is
about to get a lot worse. For the benefit of the entire system, we need to rethink the role
of teachers, and related support functions if we are to have any hope of educating the
rapidly growing youth population in our country. In the very near future there will be less
teachers serving more learners on less budget in our country, and the current system
will come under even more strain than it already is.
Historically, the role of a teacher is extremely multifaceted. Teachers are required to be
subject matter experts, content developers, lesson facilitators, markers, administrators,
counsellors, coaches, social workers and much more. This multifaceted role is
extremely effective when well qualified teachers provide education to learners in small
classes, but as soon as the class sizes increase, the model struggles to
commensurately scale quality education. The primary reason for this is due to the
bundled nature of the teacher role.
This historic model is out of reach for the vast majority of South Africans. We don’t have
enough quality teachers, most especially in rural and impoverished areas, and the
model is extremely expensive to run.
UCT Online High School seeks to unbundle the role of the teacher, and recognise that
technology can and must play a crucial role in lowering cost, increasing efficiency and
enabling scale in our education system - we need to leverage technology to do what it
does best, and for technology to take on as much of the teaching and learning role as
possible over time.
We also recognise that humans will continue to play a vital role in the mediation of
education, but they are also the primary driver of cost, and as mentioned, we simply
don’t have enough teachers in the country. We need to reserve precious human time to
only do what technology doesn’t do well if we want to scale the limited pool of teachers
serving an increasing youth population.
This is a hard problem to solve, especially in education, but we simply cannot keep
doing what we’ve always done in the education system and hope for better results. The
current crisis necessitates leapfrog innovations, and the team at UCT Online High
School are working tirelessly to enable this possibility.
If you ask an existing teacher if technology could ever do their job, most will tell you
(understandably) - no. Their job is too complex, too varied. There are parts that can
never be done by technology, however advanced the AI.
What is misleading about the question is that technology doesn’t ‘do’ jobs. Technology
‘does’ tasks. If you ask an existing teacher again if there are any tasks in their job that
could be potentially automated? Most will say yes. One task at a time - that’s how
automation increasingly drives efficacy and efficiency in industries. Technology can
scale almost infinitely at an extremely low cost per task. Tasks that are capable of being
automated, are automated. Tasks that are harder to automate, are typically
reconstituted into a series of specialised human jobs. In the case of UCT Online High
School, this includes human graded assessments.
Numerous international studies have shown that a major contribution to the endemic
crisis in the teaching profession is that teachers are so overwhelmed by the
overwhelming number of roles they need to perform that they do not have time to teach.
Given that, every year in South Africa, we have a chronic shortage of both school places
and teachers, we believe that solutions such as the approach that we have developed
are essential to ensure that all learners, whatever their socioeconomic circumstances,
have access to the education that they deserve.
Daily Maverick has been reliably informed that, following an outcry from parents
about the quality of marking, the school sent out communication to guardians
claiming that all of the end of year exams would be graded internally by its
teachers. However, we understand that Teach Me 2 is still marking the majority of
the end of year examinations.
2.4) What is the school’s response to the above allegations?
All our grading is moderated by our fully qualified teachers, and always has been. As
already explained, our partnership with Teach Me 2 gives us access to fully trained first-
level markers. Once an initial mark has been proposed in terms of the specific rubric for
the answer, the learner’s work is moderated by our teachers as the next level of the
process. Any other arrangement would be impracticable. For example, for our end-of-
year examinations that are currently nearing completion, our learners will submit 68 265
individual examination scripts for which we will have provided just over one thousand
hours of moderation. The approach that we follow in grading learners’ work at this scale
is based on tried and tested approaches used by leading universities across the world.
We are currently in the process of fully internalising functions that have previously been
supplied by Teach Me 2, and while we had hoped to fully internalise the function by the
end of year exams, the scale of exam marking necessitated a blended approach. On
17 November, we wrote to all parents and guardians, setting out in detail arrangements
for the end-of-year examinations. Specifically, we said: “In the spirit of continual
improvement, we have identified a number of key enhancements that we are currently
phasing in. These include internalising all marking for 2023. This means that exam
marking will be done by our teachers and our dedicated markers (who are all qualified
teachers) throughout the exam period. Following this, we will apply our post-moderation
processes prior to finalising grades for this set of exams.” By internalising this function
in 2023, we will be directly managing all marking processes by a network of part-time,
fully-qualified teachers, who will provide the first-level marking.
It is claimed that it was often the case that Teach Me 2 took much longer than the
48 hour timeframe which it was prescribed to mark learners’ assignments,
causing learners to fall behind as they were unable to progress to the next
module until the mark was logged by Teach Me 2. We understand that guardians
were not informed that this was a reason for a delay, but the impact this had on
children falling behind caused considerable anxiety and distress among both
learners and guardians.
2.5) What is the school’s response to the above allegations?
96% of Teach Me 2 marking was delivered on time and where it was late, Teach Me 2
typically took less than 24 hours to correct this. More importantly, we identified at the
end of the first quarter of the year that some learners were falling behind their
recommended pace. We analysed this in depth and found that there were a variety of
reasons contributing to this trend. We responded quickly and removed any gating of
progress based on marking as we moved into the second quarter, and thereafter we
phased in a four-term structure over the course of the second half of this school year,
which will be standard for 2023 and beyond. This system of dynamic support has
already allowed many of our learners to make up for lost time. While there were some
cases in which it took us longer to complete the process of first-level marking and
required moderation, this was not the primary reason for learners falling behind.
Daily Maverick has seen multiple report cards where students have received zero
for certain subjects. We understand that this was often because learners
submitted the wrong document, but that the school’s strict resubmission policy
allows for only one resubmission per term for all subjects. When children miss
submissions for reasons beyond their control such as loadshedding, WiFi issues
or technical glitches, they are then automatically given zero, and parents have
claimed that the process of querying or rectifying this issue is complicated and
generally never resolved.
2.6) What is the school’s response to the above allegations?
Your understanding is correct; in the large majority of cases in which a learner received
a zero for first-level marking, this was because they didn’t submit their School Based
Assessment or failed to upload their assignment or examination script successfully to
our online platform. In these cases, we did not receive a submission for the learner that
could be marked. If there was only one School Based Assessment (SBA) in a term, and
it was not submitted, the mark awarded would have been a zero. Even if other informal
assessments were submitted, the SBA marks are the only marks that count towards
their report results. If there was only one SBA in a term, and it was not submitted or
submitted incorrectly, a zero would have been reflected in the report. We have provided
appropriate opportunities for learners and guardians to rectify this, including a two week
submission window here at the end of the year to resubmit, and some 50% of our
learners have successfully used these opportunities to upload all their scripts to enable
first-level marking and subsequent moderation. It is not true that these issues are
“generally never resolved”. Many cases have been successfully resolved and, where
there are extenuating circumstances, learners, parents and guardians will have the
opportunity of appealing the final outcomes for their year once all grades have been
fully moderated and assembled in end-of-year reports.
2.7) What is UCT Online High School’s pass rate?
This is our first year of operation, and our learners are still writing their end of year
examinations. Our pass rates, and the proportion of learners promoted, granted
progression or required to repeat a grade will be known once the examinations and
examination moderation is completed. It is also not common practice to publish pass
rates, outside of the matric results. With our first group of Grade 12s starting in 2023,
we would then look to publishing any result, per the industry standard.
Guardian experiences:
Guardians have claimed the vision UCT Online High School sold them in the
beginning of the year was that the learner was at the centre, and that there would
be regular feedback provided on learner progress. Guardians have told Daily
Maverick that they feel this vision has not been carried out this year. They have
claimed that there was consistently no support, constructive feedback or
transparency from the school. Guardians have cited a lack of communication
from the support coaches and the school regarding learner progress, which led
them to assume that everything was fine until they received their child’s report
cards. Guardians also expressed disappointment that many lessons, as well as
parent meetings, were pre-recorded as the school created the impression that
there would be live virtual teaching.
3.) What is the school’s response to the above allegations?
These opinions are the views of a small number of parents and guardians who have
engaged with us on their dedicated Facebook page, or who have lodged complaints
through our formal complaints process. The large majority of parents and guardians are
happy with the progress of their learners and are fully committed to their participation in
the work and mission of our school.
All our learners receive comprehensive support and communication from our team. By
way of example, our Support Coaches and teachers alone have engaged with 329,546
personal Whatsapp and emails with guardians and learners over the last 11 months.
Our Guardian Portal offers every parent and guardian a wealth of easily available
information - far more than is provided by conventional schools. You will find a guide to
using this facility by following this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=8bGD7__mMP8&t=2s.
In addition, we have sent out over 500 school-wide informative email updates to
learners, parents and guardians over this last year, covering every aspect of the work of
our school and the opportunities we offer. However, we have found that parent and
guardians’ open rate for emails has often been as low as 20%, and that many of the
queries that we receive relate to information that we have already released.
Because of this, we will be making further enhancements to our guardian portal, and
introducing a new Guardian Mobile App early in the new school year, to enhance the
ability of parents and guardians to access relevant information from the convenience of
their phone.
We have never given the impression that we would offer live classroom teaching, and
we will not be doing so; live classroom teaching would seriously disadvantage our many
learners from lower income families who do not have access to unlimited bandwidth,
and in our opinion, is an ineffective use of teacher time considering the systemic
problems identified above. However, we do offer numerous forms of live engagement,
including Ask Me Anything sessions with teachers, and the opportunity for any learner to
take part in live sessions with leading UCT academics.
Additionally, guardians have told Daily Maverick that much of what they felt the
school promised them in the beginning of the year, in terms of a vibrant and
social community for their children through a range of extracurricular activities,
was not delivered on.
3.1) What is the school’s response to the above allegations?
This is not true. We have offered all our learners a choice of over 50 virtual clubs and
societies, including our school choir. Parents are enabled to organise in-person
meetups through the conveniently integrated meetup app on our guardian portal. We
host weekly assemblies. Our Student Wellbeing Team offers “Movement Thursdays”,
and there is a daily live check-in for learners with their Support Coaches every morning.
We have recently launched the Grade 11 Leadership Squad. We provide a full suite of
careers services.
Here is a recent observation by one of our Support Coaches that is testimony to the
quality of the engaged experience that we offer to all our learners:
“I've seen learners who had never touched a laptop before, figure it out and thrive
online. I've seen learners who have nothing, show up and give absolutely everything.
I've met with learners each morning who smile, make me laugh and appreciate the
opportunity to be in an Online High School. I've witnessed learners who would
previously be in boarding school, away from their families, work so hard to make sure
they do well, as online school means they can travel with their parents for work and
another learner whose family are caravanning along the coast of South Africa, surfing all
the best beaches with their kids, all because they can take their school with them and
still focus on their studies.”
Guardians have cited numerous technical issues with the online portal and the
app linked to the school’s online platform. These include technical errors with
submissions and the guardian’s dashboard not being synchronous with the
learner’s dashboard. They have claimed that when they raised their concerns with
the school management, the school diverted the blame, saying guardians needed
to contact the app makers.
3.2) What is the school’s response to the above allegations?
There were some initial technical issues at the beginning of the year involving the
specialised third-party application that we use for online invigilation (which is also used
by many other reputable academic institutions). Many of these have now been resolved
although it is inevitable that some learners will find the use of new and unfamiliar digital
applications challenging. We continually monitor our provision of IT services against
generally used benchmarks and we have achieved an average monthly uptime of
greater than 99.76% throughout this school year, with uptime of 100% for 8 of the 11
months of the year.
Teachers have claimed that they have been given considerably less agency as the
year progressed. For example, it is claimed that teachers used to be able to see
when a learner failed on the platform and then they could reach out to them. That
was then removed. Teachers say they are unable to know when a learner fails
unless they reach out to the teacher. Teachers have also claimed that the school
management had begun diverting emails for teachers to support coaches.
3.3) What is the school’s response to the above allegations?
This is not true. When we launched our school at the beginning of this year we offered
live sessions for learners who failed our Mastery Checks, which are designed to prepare
learners for the formal School Based Assessments that would follow. However, we
found that this remediation model was not adequately addressing learner needs and
that there was a low learner uptake of this facility. Consequently, we are now
transitioning to data-driven interventions, enabling us to intervene when the evidence
shows that individual learners require additional support. Teachers are still able to
support learners who require further academic support and have always been able to
see their learners' performance on the online campus, and still can. Support Coaches
are responsible for offering complementary pastoral care to our learners, and teachers
refer learners to Support Coaches where this is warranted. This has always been our
approach, with the priority of adequately supporting our learners.
Guardians have told Daily Maverick that UCT Online High School has deleted
negative comments from parents who have highlighted issues at the school on
its Facebook page. Additionally, some parents have claimed that they have been
blocked from having access to the public UCT Online High School page. Daily
Maverick has been reliably informed by staff at UCT Online High School that the
social media team was instructed to delete negative comments.
3.4) What is the school’s response to the above allegations which concern a lack
of transparency by the school?
This is also untrue. Our social media team only removes public comments that violate
our Social Media Policy, which is agreed to by every guardian and learner on enrolment,
as outlined in our Learner Code of Conduct and Guardian Code of Conduct. We take
genuine negative comments very seriously, and these are thoughtfully responded to
publicly, for the benefit of the guardian or learner, as well as for prospective guardians,
and they remain on our Facebook page. Additionally, guardians and learners who post
to Facebook are always contacted offline by our team to assist in resolving their specific
issue. With regards to our closed Facebook group, guardians are only removed as
members when their child is no longer enrolled in UCT Online High School.
Proposed restructuring:
Communication from UCT Online High School which was sent to guardians and
learners in October 2022, states that the school would be restructuring the roles
and responsibilities of some of its team members in 2023. It does not stipulate
that the school has slashed its teaching staff of 128 teacher positions to 71
learning facilitator positions which we understand from internal communication
that Daily Maverick has seen. The documents that Daily Maverick has seen
clearly request staff to maintain confidentiality and to not raise the restructure
with learners or guardians. If asked directly about the proposed restructuring,
they are instructed to use a canned response. We understand that at UCT Online
High School many teachers have class sizes of over 400 learners. Effectively
reducing the number of teachers – or learning facilitators – which UCT
Online High School plans to do from next year, we understand would create an
environment where there would be roughly one learning facilitator per 1,600
learners.
4.) Why has UCT Online High School decided to reduce its number of teachers
next year?
4.1 Why has UCT Online High School not informed guardians and learners
explicitly about these changes, in order for them to make informed decisions?
It is common practice in any restructuring process to require confidentiality from affected
individuals so that the process can be carried out fairly. Nevertheless, we have
communicated the full range of changes that we intend to make to our guardians and
learners.
Based on our comprehensive data set, and related insights, from our first year of
operation, we are introducing a range of enhancements to our learning and teaching
model that will be fully implemented for the start of the new school year in January. This
has necessitated a realignment of staffing roles. In addition we have scaled back our
targets for enrollment in 2023 because of the deteriorating economic environment,
already evidenced by the number of learners who have had to withdraw because of
tuition-fee debt; as a private school we do not receive any state subsidies and we are
dependent on fee revenues to continue operations. As a consequence of these factors
we are completing a restructuring process, following the requirements of labour
legislation, which will result in some of our current staff leaving us. In addition, earlier
this year we built up our staff capacity to welcome an additional 2500 learners in June
(based on the 13,000 applications for our January 2022 cohort) but only welcomed 400
in June. This has meant that we've been over capacitated for the majority of 2022,
which is being corrected through our restructuring exercise.
Comparisons with learner/teacher ratios in conventional schools are inappropriate and
misleading because we do not divide each grade cohort into conventional classes, and
as explained above in this document, the conventional role of a teacher is unbundled
into a series of specialist roles in our model. Some of these roles are performed by
technology and pre-created content, and others are supported by a suite of human roles
including learning facilitators, support coaches, technical support officers, learning
designers, project managers, data analysts, administrators and so on.
Our specialist learning facilitators use each learner’s unique digital footprint, along with
learning analytics and real-time data reports, to provide targeted academic support.
We understand that this restructuring has been vehemently opposed by a number
of teachers who argue that it would mean even less teacher support for students,
and would not be taking their needs and interests into consideration. They have
claimed that the product offered by UCT Online High School this year has
negatively affected students, and these incoming changes are not going to be
beneficial.
4.2 What is the school’s response to these allegations?
We have fully briefed parents, guardians and learners in a series of emails. All affected
staff have been fully consulted, as is required in law, and we have taken all points of
view seriously. Of course, some of our affected staff disagree with our approach, many
of whom’s alternative suggestions are to provide a more traditional education
experience, which would require us to significantly increase our price point in order to
offer the model of education sustainably. Considering our mission, these are not viable
suggestions.
Others have accepted the necessity for these changes, have made valuable
suggestions which we have adopted, and have applied successfully for other roles in
our organisation. The changes we are making are directly premised on the data, and
related insights, we have generated in our first year of operation. We are confident that
the changes that we are making will both fully meet the needs of all our current learners
and will, in many respects, offer them an enhanced experience next year.
