the official government position is that the General Education Certificate will help learners to identify education and training options that would best suit their inclinations. They also argue that a national Grade 9 assessment will provide valuable information about how much young people have actually learnt. National assessment at the end of Grade 9 could offer an earlier opportunity to hold learners, teachers, schools, and the system accountable.
The three streams or pathways are not entirely new. The academic stream is our typical comprehensive secondary school with academic subjects and vocationally oriented subjects like Accounting, Computer Applications Technology, and Tourism and Hospitality. This stream is currently predominant.
Second, the proposed third stream is very unclear at present, but the idea seems to be re-purposing special needs education as a solution to the failures of our schools.