Life in a ZEP school

One advisor in a public primary school in Grand Gaube emphasized some of the main problems they have concerning the education system and the impact of this system on their school.

First of all, we have to know that most pupils who are attending this school are coming from poor families and some of them have domestic problems because parents don´t really take  care of them. So, what they are trying in this center is to educate and give them facilities in order to carry on with their lives and face up their problems. But this is not always easy to accomplish.

That is why ZEP schools (Zone d' Éducation Prioritaire) have been created.

An important issue in this school is absenteeism: 25 pupils are absent per day at least. To avoid this, all pupils with no absence are rewarded with a little gift from school. This year there were 86 pupils without any absence. Therefore it is one of ZEP schools with the lowest rate of absenteeism. We discovered that they only have long absenteeism from school but no dropouts. Parents who are not satisfied with the program are transferring their children to other schools.

After seeing all this, we were wondering what the government is doing in order to help these children. The answer we got from this public school was that the government gives the books freely. Besides this, through the CSR - Program (Corporate Social Responsibility) the hotels sponsor this school so that pupils receive for free school materials and they can also take part in activities like workshops on different themes.

Apart from this, they don´t receive any money from the Ministry in order to give scholarships. But they have a program for rewarding those who perform well at school.

But what about disabled children? The answer was that it takes a long time (about 3 or 4 months) before the Ministry is sending a person in order to refer him to a special care unit. That is why they prefer to work with private organizations.

Besides this, the school offers a special program for Standard 2 called ZP for children who face difficulties at home. Many of them live in broken families and they are grown up by their grandparents as their fathers are alcoholics or their mothers are in jail. A person is coming once a week to talk with the parents and the pupils to help them to express themselves. They also have the parents´ mediator who is visiting the parents when the children are absent from school for a long period. Furthermore social workers are coming to school in order to get some feedback from the teachers. Then they refer the children to different associations like therapists or psychologists for special care. For these reasons the school encourages children to attend higher schools like universities and also invites former students.

Through many sponsors, parents’ mediator and special programs like Enhancement-Program, which has been introduced for Standard 3 and 4 pupils and the Remedial-Classes sponsored by a group called Lux, this school gives the children the facilities to have a better performance in their studies afterwards.

As far as the religion, languages and culture are concerned they put accent on Catholicism but they obviously welcome all types of religion. If parents don´t agree on that, there are other classes for different religions. In this school there are no conflicts between the different confessions even though they are mingled in a classroom.

There is a maximum of 36 pupils in one class, they would like to work with less but there is a great demand in Mauritius. All subjects are taught in English but in order to communicate better with the children they use Creole, which is also commonly spoken amongst children. Moreover, Creole has been introduced only in Standard 1 as a subject.

They also have the chance to attend private tuition during their holidays. In the advisor’s opinion there is no difference between private tuition and normal classes. The parents ask for extra-coaching in order to enhance learning and to allow their children having more practice in different subjects as there is a great competition at the CPE-Level. The problem is that some pupils cannot afford this private tuition but sometimes there are also teachers who accept them. This kind of tuition is just for Standard 5 and 6.

Thanks to all these efforts this school has improved the passing rate of exams from 40% till 49% in only one year.

Later we met with a catholic priest and we asked him some questions about climate change and environmental care. He was born in Mauritius, where he has spent almost his entire life, so he could tell us a lot about changes that appeared since he was born.

In his opinion the most significant change is that during recent years there are much less cyclones. They always brought misery and fear and right now the lack of them makes poor people happier, because they suffer less.

He also pointed out that it is very good that young people from all over the world are coming to Mauritius, because they are more aware about the environmental care and recycling and therefore they can inform the Mauritian society about these issues. One of the main problems is also the lack of education among citizens, because even though they i.e. have a good material status, they are used to throwing the rubbish out of their BMW directly to the street… Despite the fact that there are some campaigns going on right now, after few days/weeks there is no one to take care of new bins and everything is going back to normal.

Taking care about environment in Mauritius is still not perfect, but people are slowly changing their attitudes. Problems that still exist are individualistic type of mentality and lack of solidarity, so the only solution for now is to educate youngsters how to keep their environment clean.