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The national curriculum in our schools is now due for a re-examination and the introduction of any changes or upgrades, a process that needs to be done after seven years since the last major or minor changes were made.

In her recent address to the National Association of Primary School Heads, Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Evelyne Ndlovu saw some critical changes that needed to be made, especially in the basic primary curriculum, and particularly when it came to the basics of reading, writing and basic arithmetic and combining these into functional literacy and numeracy.

She was using the recently released report by ZimStat based on the national census held in April, to pinpoint areas where Zimbabwe simply had to do better to educate the next generations. She added in figures from United Nations reports.

She was particularly concerned about the fall in literacy from 95 percent to 93 percent, that is the number of people aged 15 and over who had not completed at least grade 3, for the ZimStat definition, although we also need to take into account functional literacy, those who can read and write fairly fluently.

The ZimStat statistics and definition will reflect earlier problems, people who missed schooling a decade or more ago, but were also brought up to date by the finding that almost 6 percent of the entire population aged over four had never been to school. Some of these will be very small children starting next year, but some are those left behind somewhere in the life.

We talk a lot about the need for education in the upper levels, secondary school and tertiary education, to prepare children and youths for being productive in the modern world, which means they need to be able to apply theory they learn to practice and do this well.

But that still means the primary, and especially the lower primary, part of their education has to equip them to absorb all that they need to learn as they climb the education ladder, and that continuous education they need as adults to cope with the technology changes in a rapidly changing world.

So at the base there has to be that functional literacy and numeracy, the sort of thing we are all supposed to learn in primary school and especially in the lower grades.

This is the ultimate in practical education when you think about, the essential skills that everything we learn later is built on and the essential skills that we need to learn more. As Dr Ndlovu pointed out, the actual way this is done can vary. She spoke of the critical need to make sure these basics were well taught, and fully taught, in schools in deprived areas.

That is one problem that has been addressed in Zimbabwe, and one reason we have a national curriculum, but as a good Education Minister she wants something a lot closer to perfection.

It is done better in some schools than others, instead of being done exceptionally well in all schools.

That brings up the other area of concern, school attendance. It is high, but that six percent who have never been to school, while low when expressed as a number, is still far too high when we start looking at the actual people.

Some, of course, may be old, and missed out in colonial days. We can do our best to relieve their plight, but that group, in the nature of things, will be diminishing.

More important are the drop our rates, and the fact that some small children of school-going age are not at school.

The main reason for both is financial, ZimStat reports. Some children start late or miss out because of remote location and the like, and the Second Republic has returned to the school building programme that had waned a bit in the first couple of decades of the new century.

However, both direct investment, and the way communities are using devolution funds, are filling perceived practical gaps.

Every child has a right to education, a right that can be enforced, but sometimes there are practical difficulties including over-long walks. The financial aspect still exists, along with some cultural influences that tend to hit girls more than boys. Dr Ndlovu brought this up, making it exceptionally clear that she would enforce strictly the requirements that any increases in fees or levies needed approval.

While public school fees are kept low, with large input from the State, such as hiring all teachers using the national budget rather than parent’s money, the levy problem does exist.

The Second Republic has made a major input through BEAM, the scheme to cover fees of children whose parents cannot afford them, and now roughly a third of all children are seeing fees provided by the programme.

But while BEAM does cover basics it does not cover everything and here is where schools need to be careful. When levies were introduced in the early 1980s the then minister made two things very clear.

The first was that a significant majority of parents of children at a school had to approve the levy, and that the school or its development committee had to put in place a functional and practical system whereby those who legitimately could not afford them could have reductions, or in special cases see the levies dropped.

He agreed this was at schools nearest to the child who needed help. Life moves on and some schools have forgotten at least the second point, of catering for children from the poorest households. And admittedly there are some parents who just do not care very much and do not attend meetings and vote. The system worked, but it needs the co-operation of all to make it work.

So the review has its work cut out. A major input into the primary school curriculum must, oddly enough, come from secondary school heads.

They know, better than almost anyone, just how well prepared their form one pupils are, not just the brighter children from families where parents care but also those who are less gifted, or who have parents who do not care very much.

We suspect most would back the minister in her call for increased emphasis on those essential skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, to ensure that every child can handle the widening of the subject workload and the depth required at the secondary level.

The critical word here is “every”, not just most, not even almost all, but everyone. And those skills need to be at the required level, that is fluent readers and writers who can then progress without having to think too much about the basics.