Basic education minister Angie Motshekga has commended the matric class of 2022 for achieving an 80.1% pass rate, which puts the candidates in good stead for accessing university education, amid calls for a complete overhaul of the country’s public education system.
The 80.1% pass rate is a significant improvement on the 76.4% of 2021 and the 76.2% pass rate recorded the year before. However, it pales next to the 98.42% pass rate achieved by Independent Examinations Board (IEB) candidates, with 89.32% of them attaining bachelor’s passes.
There are growing calls for an overhaul of the “outdated” public education system to improve the matric pass rate and put the public schooling on par with its private school counterparts. Poor education outcomes in the public sector have been singled out as one of the structural issues behind SA’s chronic unemployment, with critics saying the skills taught at schools do not match the demands of the labour market.
SA Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago has echoed this sentiment, saying SA’s education system wasn’t equipping learners with the skills needed in a modern era.
“Unemployment in this country is structural,” policymakers have “got to be alive to the fact” that SA’s education system isn’t equipping learners with the skills needed in a modern era, Kganyago said in an interview with broadcaster CNBC Africa on the sidelines of the WEF in Davos on Tuesday.
SA has been under pressure to improve its poor education outcomes, with calls to increase the mediocre 30% matric pass mark to 50% to equip young people for better work and career opportunities in a competitive global environment.
Stakeholders have also raised concerns about grade inflation — a phenomenon in which learners are given higher grades than they actually obtained in the subject — saying the practice is predominant in the public schooling system. This practice helps to pass struggling learners to the next grade, while also assisting to keep the school’s image intact.
Elize du Plessis, professor of curriculum and instructional studies at Unisa, said grade inflation was “definitely more [prevalent] in public schools” as government wanted to be seen to be improving the pass rate.
Low standard
“If you look at the 30% pass mark, it’s not worth pushing [struggling] learners to the next grade, but the standard is so low,” Du Plessis said.
She said Covid-19 over the past two years had a profound social and emotional impact on learners. “We learnt that learners lost a lot of work during the past two years of the pandemic,” Du Plessis said.
“To improve our [public] education [system] we need to increase admission requirements both at schools and for teachers who want to become educators. The modern world values people who can be creative and communicate their ideas better. Our systems is outdated and doesn’t make use of technology,” Du Plessis said.
Motshekga’s spokesperson, Elijah Mhlanga, said there was no need to compare IEB matric results with public schools. This, he said, was tantamount to comparing JSE-listed companies with unlisted enterprises.
“The IEB had 10,000 matric candidates. That equates to the 10,000 learners we had in one district in the Free State. We should not be comparing because the IEB admits [learners] based on affordability and academic strength, they are not doing anything miraculously,” Mhlanga said.
“I will pray and fast this year so that next year [2024] we don’t compare IEB and public schooling pass rates.” The government and IEB “share the same grade 12 markers and we all get quality assured by Umalusi”.
National Professional Teachers Organisation of SA executive director Basil Manuel echoed Mhlanga, saying: “A comparison is a very difficult one. We are talking about a system [IEB] that has 10,000 matriculants to one that has almost 800,000.
“Comparisons can’t be made. You can’t compare the type of facilities they [IEB] have, against facilities of broader public schools, even when it comes to class size.”
Grade inflation “doesn’t happen in private schools, but it does happen in public schools and it’s for a variety of reasons”, he said, before cutting the call short to attend the matric results announcement.
Weakest link
Education expert professor Gezani Baloyi said improving the public education system required identifying the weakest link in the sector, which he said was human resources.
This was a crucial area dealing with the “recruitment of teachers, their training, performance, and management.
“We need to ask: do we have the right people in the right positions [at our schools]? Policies are there, good policies, but in terms of implementation, that requires attention,” Baloyi said.
It was unfair to compare IEB and public schools as the former were well resourced with large classrooms, while public schools have a higher teacher-pupil ratio.
Education advocacy group Equal Education (EE) said the class of 2022 was not only forced to prepare for and take their final examinations during SA’s worst year of rolling electricity blackouts, “but they also bore the brunt of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the education sector.
“The class of 2022 grappled with unique challenges, such as disruptions to learning caused by load-shedding and damage to school infrastructure caused by heavy rainfall ahead of their final examinations. These had serious consequences for learning and potentially compromised their wellbeing, exam readiness, and final performance,” the advocacy group said. This sentiment was also echoed by Motshekga.
The disruptions as learners prepared for their final exams caused “deep psychological stress that will surely have impacted learners’ performance”.
The 2022 matric results “should push the sector to seriously reflect on educational quality and serve as a call to action for the [department of basic education] to carry out a comprehensive intervention”.
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