The government has failed to meet its target for increasing the number of matric candidates who achieved quality passes for physical science to 35,000 by 2024, a report on the latest national senior certificate exams reveals.
Only 31,345 of the 200,715 candidates who wrote physical science examinations administered by the basic education department achieved 60% or more, according to its 2024 National Senior Certificate Examination report. Not only is the figure a decline on the 35,468 students who reached this benchmark in 2023, but it is a worse performance than the pre-coronavirus pandemic attainment of the class of 2019, which saw 32,572 candidates score 60% or higher for physical science.
Physical science and maths are gateway subjects for students aiming for degrees in science, maths, engineering and technology disciplines, which lead to careers in industries essential for economic growth.
“We have simply not been able to get back to where we were before the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Servaas van der Berg, director of the Research on Socioeconomic Policy unit at Stellenbosch University.
The government has, however, exceeded its 2024 target for the number of candidates scoring 60% or more for maths, which was also set at 35,000. Of the 251,488 candidates who sat the maths exam in 2024, 44,636 reached this benchmark, shows the report.
Van der Berg said these results still fell short of SA’s needs.
“We still have all the problems we had before the pandemic, and the levels [of achievement] are just not what is required. We are going to struggle to have the necessary numbers of graduates in technical fields, which unfortunately means we are not going to change SA’s income distribution,” he said.
SA has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality, with the top 20% of earners holding more than 68% of the country’s income, according to the IMF.
The shortage of graduates in technical fields suggested the government should make it easier for immigrants with these skills to work in SA, he said.
Stellenbosch University economist Martin Gustafsson, who is also an adviser to the basic education department, said the disruption to face-to-face learning caused by the government’s response to Covid-19 pandemic had a particularly severe effect on the teaching of physical science, as it requires practical work and experiments.
While acknowledging that SA needed more school leavers with quality passes in maths and physical science, he cautioned against simply increasing the number of students enrolling in these subjects.
“The analysis in the sector review [published by the education department in 2024] shows the wider the door is open to mathematics and physical science participation, the lower the number of high achievers,” he said.
That more than half of the candidates who took maths in 2024 failed at the 40% level suggested they should not have enrolled for the subject at all and taken maths literacy instead, he said. A total of 69% passed maths at 30% and 75.6% passed physical science at this threshold.
Gustafsson’s argument is borne out by the performance of the Western Cape, which has the second-lowest provincial participation rate for maths, at 23.8%, and attained the highest provincial pass rate for the subject, at 78%.
The performance of candidates attending schools offering national senior certificate exams administered by the basic education department stands in stark contrast to that of students at schools offering exams administered by the Independent Examinations Board (IEB). A total of 8,867 candidates wrote the IEB-administered maths exams, of whom 95.9% passed at the 30% threshold, and 64% attained 60% or higher. In physical science, there were a total of 5,661 IEB candidates, 95% of whom passed at the 30% mark, and 55.4% of whom attained 60% or higher. IEB-administered exams are only offered at some independent schools, which are better resourced than most state schools.
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