South Africa

South African Statistical Association's (SASA) Teacher resources contains the South African curriculum, some resources on data handling and other resources on probability.

The Times I Am Living can be found in the Department of Education, Thutong Educational Portal. In goes out to schools and other subscribers free of charge, on e-mail, carrying world news that is easy for people such as primary school learners to read and understand. Journalist Duncan Guy started it three years ago for his son and it has since been developed with feedback from educators. It is produced twice a week, during school terms, by the SA Press Association (Sapa) and it is funded by a grant from the Open Society Foundation for South Africa.

For further inquiries, e-mail Duncan Guy

Maths Trail-Blazers In August 2006 Statistics South Africa’s attention was drawn to a newspaper article about a young man called Victor Sebothoma who was teaching Mathematics in a remote school outside Hammanskraal, Pretoria.

A new generation of statisticians to arise from KwaZulu-Natal 26 October 2007

Statistics South Africa is adopting a number of identified Dinaledi schools in KwaZulu-Natal, under the auspices of the ISIbane Social Responsibility Programme of the 57th Session of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) to be held in Durban in 2009. The ISIbalo Capacity Building and the ISIbane Social Responsibility Programmes, which are incorporated into the programme of the 57th Session of the ISI, aim to build capacity and encourage African scholarly participation during the ISI session as well as ongoing statistics education activities and training programmes to increase statistical literacy in the country.

The Dinaledi Programme was established in 2001 as an initiative to improve the performance of the schooling system in respect of Mathematics and Science. This augurs well with the objectives of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA) and Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA) programmes of government that seeks to accelerate growth and build capacity of scarce skills in the country hence capacity building in the field of mathematics and science can never be overemphasised.

A new generation of statisticians will arise from KwaZulu-Natal as rural schools in Ndwendwe are taken under the wing of Statistics South Africa through the ISIbalo and ISIbane programmes. Statistician General of South Africa, Pali Lehohla launched the programme at a ceremony in Ndwendwe. Shown are some of the members of ISIBALO team, ISLP visitor and the Director of ISIBALO Dr. Mafafo (right)

The South African Statistical Association Education Committee is highly involved in the education of schools teachers in South Africa. The current chair is Professor Delia Nortth of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

From 2001 onwards, the SASA Education committee has spent a lot of time focusing on statistics education at school level in South Africa. This major shift occurred as a result of the inclusion of vast amounts of statistical material in the new school syllabus, to be fully implemented by 2008. Workshops and motivational talks are held regularly aimed at developing data handling skills of teachers. These efforts are now shared with the Math4Stats program initiated by Statistics South Africa in 2006. The materials for the workshops are prepared by Professor Delia Nortth and Jacke Scheiber of Radmaste, Wits.

The Education committe also oversees the Honors project competition and bursary/scholarship awards, the latter sponsored by Statistics South Africa. Bursaries and scholarships are also annually awarded to three students registering for a third year course in Statistics at a South African tertiary institution.

SASA Education committee is also actively involved in the Math4Stats campaign started in 2006 by Statistics South Africa (see elsewhere in this page).

The SASA education committee also organizes an invited speaker plenary session and annual workshop during the annual conference each year. The committee works closely with other institutions involved in statistics education such as the Association of Mathematics Educators (AMESA), the Deapartment of Education (DOE), Statistics South Africa and the UK Royal Statistical Society.

We see some of the members of SASA and visitors to the SASA conference in 2007, with Delia North (4th from left) in the picture below.

This program was launched in 2006 by Statistics South Africa. Other institutions, such as South African Statistical Association and the Association of Mathematics Educators of SA are actively involved in its implementation. This project conducts workshops to train teachers in data handling and will eventually result in “Master Trainers,” employed by Statistics South Africa. These master trainers will co-ordinate the running of statistics workshops to school teachers all over the country.

The CensusAtSchool project was conducted in 2001 in South Africa, sponsored by Statistics South Africa and SASA's Official Statistics Committee, which is chaired by Jackie Galpin. The ISLP web page on CensusAtSchool contains more information, as this project was done in coordination with the International CensusAtSchool project. South Africa plans to conduct another CensusAtSchool in 2008.

Curriculum changes. From the link given go to “Teaching Statistics at School Level” and then “Why Statistics at Schools”? A .pdf document entitled “Why in the World should a Math Teacher be glad with Statistics,”

The South African Statistical Association (SASA) awards Pali Lehohla, Statistician General of Statistics South Africa , the 2007 Award for Contribution to Statistical Literacy in South Africa. The Award was presented at the 50th SASA meeting (October 29th-November 2, 2007).

Statistics South Africa is well known for bringing teachers to the ISI biennial meeting in Lisbon. These are teachers that have always had a school in her/his heart. The teachers that Stats South Africa brought to Portugal during the ISI 2007 meeting are shown in the following picture. They are among the oldest in the country. See picture here.

Miranda Mafafo, Maseka Lesaoana, Jackie Galpin, Delia North, Jackie Scheiber, Pali Lehola ( ISIBALO group), Math4stat coordinators and hundreds of teachers.