SA is looking brighter

SOUTH Africa's class of 2011 bagged a staggering 48 990 distinctions in 12 key subjects in last year's matric exams.

Despite a slight drop in the math pass rate, 5669 out of the country's 224635 pupils who wrote the subject obtained distinctions.

Other highlights include:

• The general pass rate is 7.7 percentage points higher than in 2008, when the National Senior Certificate was introduced;
• Fifty-four of the poorest schools achieved a 100% pass rate; and
• At least 2899 schools scored a 100% pass rate in maths and 3384 in physical science.

But among the biggest disappointments in last year's results was the 11.2 percentage point drop in the pass rate for economics. Only 1058 out of 133358 pupils managed to land distinctions in the subject; 85411 passed.

KwaZulu-Natal showed a decline with a 68.1% pass rate, as did the Northern Cape with 68.8%. The Western Cape and Gauteng matriculants respectively achieved pass rates of 82.9% and 81.1%.

The Eastern Cape is the worst-performing province with a 58.1% pass rate.

It has five of the country's worst-performing school districts - Butterworth, Fort Beaufort, Libode, Mount Frere and Sterkspruit.

The Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, said teams would be deployed to the 15 underperforming districts to help turn them around.

She dismissed suggestions to reintroduce inspectors to schools.

"I don't believe that an inspectorate can change the system. It's leadership in schools that can change that. We have to strengthen school leadership as a starting point."

Motshekga joined senior education officials and analysts who hailed the 70.2% national pass rate, slightly higher than the previous year's 67.8%.

A total of 120767 pupils achieved a university entrance - an increase of 0.8 percentage points on the previous year.

Experts attributed the improvement in the pass rate to several factors including:

• Closer monitoring of schools' performance by district, provincial and national department officials;
• Setting common papers across the provinces;
• A better exam system;
• Pupils being exposed to a host of resource material; and
• Interventions running into billions of rands by the national and provincial education departments, such as the provision of workbooks and revision camps as well as weekend and holiday classes for pupils.

Provincial interventions last year included 172 revision camps, involving 186 poorly performing schools and 12000 pupils in the Eastern Cape; 124 camps for 62688 pupils in Gauteng; 21 540 pupils attending winter classes in Mpumalanga; and holiday classes and radio lessons for pupils at 178 schools in the Western Cape.

The number of schools with a 100% pass rate grew from 504 in 2010 to 544 last year. Only 15 of South Africa's 81 education districts failed to achieve a pass rate of at least 60%.

Gauteng education MEC Barbara Creecy said the main reason for her province's improved pass rate was the fact that it had managing to "turn around" the performance of many township schools.

Her department targeted 331 schools that did not achieve an 80% pass rate in the 2010 exams.

She said that more than 5 000 teachers from these schools - known as "priority schools" - were given in-service training on curriculum content.

Godwin Khosa, chief executive of Jet Education, a research and development organisation, said that growing awareness of the poor state of education, coupled with interventions by authorities, could have been behind the improved pass rate.

But he warned that the interventions, which he described as "ad hoc" measures, would not be sustainable in the long run because of the cost.

"The national department should not be running around implementing interventions. We should be looking at ways of institutionalising these interventions at school and district level," he said.

Professor Ruksana Osman, head of the University of the Witwatersrand School of Education, said the steady rise of the pass rate suggested some improvement in the education system. "We need to get a much more nuanced picture about the quality of passes. We know of the problems in maths and science but we don't know it for the other subjects," Osman said.

Education analyst Graeme Bloch said caution should be exercised when analysing the results. "The numbers [of those who wrote the exams] have gone down and half the kids are not making it through the system."