As matric results are released, the country will celebrate the vanity metrics presented by the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga. However, these do very little to reflect the true picture of education in South Africa.
Instead, what should be looked at is how many learners who entered Grade One in 2012 completed Grade 12 last year. Figures showing how many young South Africans have completed the treacherous journey from Grade One to matric will reveal the actual state of education in South Africa. The matric results presented annually simply mask the true state of education received by most learners in the country.
So says the Institute of Race Relations (IRR).
The IRR’s Makone Maja said that the minister needed to explain the worsening retention rate of NSC candidates. For example, in 2023 only 691 160 learners sat down for the final exams, compared to the 725 146 in 2022 and 704 021 the year before that. Along with this decline, has also been a reduction in ‘passes’ to 572 983 in 2023 compared to 580 555 in 2022.
Said Maja: ‘How is it that Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning including in their own languages? Why is it that we sent our Grade 5s to do a Grade 4 test at the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) only to place 48th out of 49 countries who actually sent their Grade 4s? How we expect to produce competent matriculants if it’s about 80% likely that their Grade 6 maths teachers only know mathematics content level at the Grade 4 or 5 level or below?’
Maja also took aim at the low rate of throughput. Said Maja: ‘What is being done about the alarming retention rate where only between 40% and 50% of the Grade One pupils who entered school 12 years ago make it to matric? And what about the dropout rate of Grade 10s, about a third of people who enter Grade 10 don’t make it matric two years later.’
Maja recommended that the Minister read IRR research to help tackle the country’s education crisis. She said: ‘The minister should read the IRR paper “Overcoming the odds: Why school vouchers would benefit poor South Africans,” which extensively portrays the true state of the basic education system. It tells a tale of the two education systems in the country, which can be divvied up along the quintile lines, and that it is not just the odds that parents are fighting to provide quality education for their children, it is the government. This is despite South Africa’s spend on education as a share of GDP averaging the same as high income countries who academically perform better than our learners. Every grade is a milestone of failure, not necessarily of pupils and their parents, but of the system that impedes them from succeeding.’
These damning statistics eclipse any real fighting chance students have in the basic education system and show that matric is just the tip of the iceberg. On all these accounts, the Minister’s grade is an F, and the IRR calls or her firing.
