Adolescents' experiences of leaving school before completing grade 12

M.Ed. (Psycho-educational programme development)The wide spread concern, pertaining the alarming rate of adolescents leaving school before completing Grade12 is a South African problem. The experiences of those adolescents vary greatly. In line with the South Afncan School Act (84 of 1996) education is accessible and compulsory for all. Unfortunately that provision is targeted only for grade 1to grade 9, of which grade 9 is considered an exit point for General Education and Training. There is no clear cut intervention strategy in place in the educational system toassist adolescents leaving school before completing Grade 12 in order to cope with their situation It is for this reason that the researcher took the initiative of exploring the adolescents' experiences of leaving school before completing Grade 12. The researcher realises that adolescents form alarge percentage of our country's population. Therefore they should be retained inschools in order to be capacitated, so that they can develop and sustain economic structures of a country that has a future that depends on the expertise of the youth. Retaining adolescents in schools is a necessity. As a result, in this research, an attempt is made to alert the educational stakeholders to assist the adolescents who have left school before completing Grade 12 to cope with their situation. This research study is aimed at describing the adolescents' experiences of leaving school before completing grade twelve, to provide guidelines and to make recommendations for other educational stakeholders on how these adolescents can be assisted. The setting of the study is in the informal settlement of Ekurhuleni metropolis. Thestudy is conducted through the combination of individual interviews and participant observation. The research method that was followed was qualitative, explorative, descriptive, and contextual in order to investigate what the adolescents' experiences are. Sampling was done purposively because the respondents had to be adolescents who have left the secondary school before completing grade twelve. A pilot interview study was done. Thereafter phenomenological interviews were conducted with twenty of these adolescents. During the interviews, ethical measures were adhered to and steps to ensure trustworthiness were also followed. The data was analysed as per Tesch's method of data analysis. The services of an independent coder were also employed. The results were based on the phenomenological in-depth interviews on adolescents' own experiences of leaving secondary school before completing Grade 12. The recommendations from this study were made with specific reference to the education department. educators, parents and non-governmental organisations Guidelines were described according to themes and categories of experiences. objectives and strategies