Yet another curriculum change has been rolled out by the Department of Basic Education to come into effect for grade 12s in 2013. The DBE has been doing this for a while with limited success. The new curriculum, called CAPS (which stands for Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements) is a revision of the National Curriculum Statements. The idea is that the policy statement for each subject will act as a comprehensive guide for teachers, showing them what to teach and how to assess their students. However, this means that textbooks need to change to reflect the new curriculum, and the past matric papers we have collected may well be redundant.

We decided it would be a good idea to have a list of the CAPS outlines for each subject in a spreadsheet, and were thinking that we may write a textbook for Information Technology using open content (such as Wikipedia entries) because there wasn’t a CAPS aligned IT textbook available yet. This was a very time-consuming process as the lists were in PDF form and required typing out. I completed the outlines for IT and a few other subjects, but had to put this project on the backburner for a while as other things became more important. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to come back to this project.