In just more than a month’s time, grade 12 pupils will start writing the National Senior Certificate (NSC) exams.
And during the October holidays, starting in a week’s time, provincial education departments and schools will implement “last push” strategies in the form of walk-in revision classes or residential camps where pupils will be confined to the venue for the duration of the extra classes.
It has also been a long-held tradition for many schools to host their own residential camps. Annually, the cost of the extra classes and intervention programmes for matrics runs into hundreds millions of rand.
After the writing of exams and subsequent release of the results, the perennial debate around the pass percentage, quality of passes and the number of pupils achieving bachelor passes will take place. But the “obsession” over the pass rate and fierce rivalry among provincial education departments to grab the “crown” — being declared the province with the highest pass-rate amid much fanfare — has been slammed by education experts.
One provincial education department, KwaZulu-Natal, also acknowledged last month that channelling resources over a number of years to improve matric results “may have compromised” other grades in the province, especially grades seven to nine. The department’s head of education, Godfrey Ngcobo, said the observation was that, more often than not, schools allocate the best-performing teachers to the senior grades at the expense of the lower grades.
Is it not also perhaps time for us to question the validity of announcing the provincial pass-rates and the province that is declared the overall ‘winner’ of the crown?
Prof Mary Metcalfe, a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg, joined the fray saying the prominence given to NSC results and competition to be the “top province” had a major affect on priorities across provinces. She believes success in the NSC is built on the solid foundation of learning in earlier grades. Metcalfe is not a lone voice in this debate. Prof Chika Sehoole, dean of the education faculty at the University of Pretoria, agreed that an “obsession” with the matric results has compromised the quality of the education system in general. He said principals were pressurised by circuit managers and district officials to produce top results.
His colleague from the University of Johannesburg’s Soweto campus, Prof Elbie Henning, was of the view that the best teachers should teach the “little ones”. She believes the grade one teacher was a child’s most important teacher. According to her, if that teacher and conditions in the classroom are not conducive to learning, reading and writing and understanding maths and building concepts in science, “then it’s a bit late later on”.
Yet another education expert, Prof Asheena Singh-Pillay, academic leader for the bachelor of education programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said the focus of all provincial education departments should lie across all grades. She, however, believed it was necessary to support grade 12 pupils “to address the legacy of fiscal inequalities and infrastructure backlogs that continue to exist”.
Recently, Umalusi CEO Mafu Rakometsi was adamant that the NSC is the best qualification in the world for the people of SA. His comments followed the release of a study in which the NSC was compared with five other international qualifications. It found that the NSC has a longer duration than the others and the most compulsory subjects.
The focus on improving the country’s matric results through intensive revision classes after school and over weekends and holidays is certainly not a bad thing. As professor Singh-Pillay pointed out: “It is important to remember that pupils’ outcomes in grade 12 are linked to economic growth.”
But the burning issue, which most education experts unanimously agree on, is whether we should not be investing most of our financial and human resources in the lower grades where it matters most? Is it not also perhaps time for us to question the validity of announcing the provincial pass-rates and the province that is declared the overall “winner” of the crown?
One of the useful indicators of determining how well a province performed in the matric exams could be tracing exactly how many pupils it was able to retain in the system from the time they started grade one until they reached matric.
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