Passing the National Senior Certificate (NSC) or matric exams is the crowning glory for every pupil after 12 years of schooling. And rightly so.
Their results will ultimately determine their life choices and destiny. Those achieving a bachelor’s pass have a passport to continuing their studies at higher education institutions.
Provincial education departments, supported by the basic education department, spend millions of rand on extra support to pupils in the form of weekend classes as well as autumn, winter and spring holiday classes. For example, there was an increase in the number of residential camps and weekend support programmes this year.
Indefatigable director-general of basic education Mathanzima Mweli has been criss-crossing all nine provinces monitoring the camps.
Pupils have also burnt the midnight oil preparing for the most important exam of their lives. Lest we not forget this cohort was the most severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Their worlds were turned upside down during their grade 10 and 11 years in 2020 and 2021 because of school closures and rotational classes. The learning losses they suffered were staggering to say the least.
So when most of the 921,879 pupils who are entered for the NSC, started writing their exams on Monday, one would have thought the whole nation would be behind them and do their utmost to create a conducive environment for them. Sadly, while load-shedding seriously disrupted matric pupils’ revision programme and affected 3,956 pupils during the writing of the exams so far, a much bigger threat has emerged in the form of community protests.
On Sunday Mweli and the department’s chief director for national assessment and public exams, Rufus Poliah, made an impassioned plea to the nation to allow pupils access to exam centres to write.
Our matric exams and the other end-of-the-year school-based assessments for the other grades are sacrosanct and must be protected at all costs.
They implored communities to help protect it from service delivery protests, so that “young people do not miss this opportunity that they most deserve and desperately need to sit for the final exams”.
Most disappointing, they indicated that in possibly all the days when the exams were written this week, there were community protests. On Monday in Umgungundlovu, KwaZulu-Natal, police had to escort exam officials to deliver question papers to schools.
In one of the most serious incidents, 53 pupils from Phandimfundo Secondary School in Daveyton, Gauteng, could not write the economics paper 1 on Tuesday because of community protests.
On the same day at least 459 candidates in 13 centres in North West were forced to write the paper later than the scheduled time for the same reason. And on Friday, 189 parents stormed a school in Northern Cape while pupils were writing the exams demanding the suspension of a pupil.
One can only shake one’s head in shock and utter disbelief and ask the question: just what has gone wrong with our parents and communities? Have they simply lost their minds?
Has rational thinking gone out the window? They constantly preach that our children’s future lies in getting a proper education, yet they deliberately compromise their chances of passing by having service delivery protests smack bang in the middle of exams. There is no doubt that communities’ anger over the lack of service delivery has reached boiling point. Their grievances and demands are in most cases legitimate. But deliberately jeopardising pupils’ chances of writing the matric exams in the name of service delivery protests is unforgivable.
As anyone who has written matric or any other exam will tell you, the hours and minutes before the paper is written are stressful, nerve-racking and traumatic. The last thing on a candidate’s mind is contending with the anxiety that they will be barred from accessing exam venues.
Our matric exams and the other end-of-the-year school-based assessments for the other grades are sacrosanct and must be protected at all costs. Pleas to the thugs and criminal elements to stop disrupting the exams is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough. It’s time for police to crack down on these criminals. Perpetrators bent on disrupting the matric exams should face the full might of the law, and every effort must be made to hunt them down and prosecute them.
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