The annual National Assessment (ANA) will now be extended to the entire senior phase instead of being written by only Grade 9 pupils.

Speaking at a press briefing today ahead of her budget vote speech at the National Assembly, Minister of basic education Angie Motshekga said that Grade 7 and 8 pupils would also write the assessments this year.

ANA was introduced four years ago and tests pupils in Grades 3, 6 and 9 on numeracy and literacy skills.

“ANA continues to be a very helpful tool to help us assess and identify schools that need intensive support, so we are increasing ANA from 7 million learners that we are assessing to 9 million because we will be doing the entire senior phase,” said Mothsekga.

“It is quite clear from the results of Grade 9 that your senior phase is your death trap so we felt we should take the entire phase and assess entirely , so that teachers are able to benchmark that which they are supposed to be teaching in the entire senior phase.”

In the last two years pupils in Grade 9 continued to perform badly in the assessments especially in Maths.

Last year they scored a shocking 10.8% in maths which was a decrease from 14% in 2013.

Speaking last year, Motshekga said the continuous dismal results of Grade 9 pupils in the assessment where a “major problem” and that the department needed to “put up a huge fight” to improve them.

She also announced that next month 1 000 schools offering Grades 1 to 3 will implement the Early Grade Reading Assessment.

“A NEEDU [National Education Evaluation and Development Unit] report raised lots of challenges that our learners have around reading proficiency, reading less words in so many minutes ... So we will be using that test to see where are to benchmark so that teachers know where the starting point is in terms of reading efficiency,” she said.

The assessment is an international bench marked assessment which assesses reading proficiency through letter, sound and word recognition and passage reading, she added.