On October 21 an estimated 727,121 full-time candidates will start to write their final examinations (National Senior Certificate) working through 167 question papers with the results to be released in mid-January 2025. Stunningly, there were 1.1-million learners in grade 10 in 2022, begging the question what happened to the 34% of missing learners since then or, for that matter, the 40% who started in grade 1 in 2012 when there were 1,209,973 children anticipating a full and complete education over 12 years? The staggering drop-off in candidates between grades 10 and 12 still does not ring alarm bells in either the department of basic education or enjoy sustained close-up analysis in the education research departments of our public universities.
We already know who has gone missing, so to speak. It is the children of poor and working-class families saddled with an inferior education and weaker learning outcomes. That is according to a recent World Bank report on education in the Western Cape, finding that 60% of the province’s children attend the wealthier schools (Quintiles 4 and 5) where maths and science scores are better than some first-world nations, but well below international benchmarks set in the case of poorer schools. That reality does not need an announcement from the World Bank, but it is a timely reminder that which school you attend still defines what kind of academic outcomes you can expect. The fact that the Q4 and Q5 schools are no longer white merely underlines the fact that a racially exclusive system has been replaced by a class-exclusive school system; there are no whites in Q1 and 2 schools.
What we also know is how organisations behave when put under pressure to increase performance outcomes without a corresponding investment of resources to achieve them: they take shortcuts.
What these global numbers eclipse, however, is how easy it has become to pass the NSC exams in the first place. We know by now the bigger picture of a 30% pass requirement in the normal subjects and 40% in the home languages. What we know much less of is how the micropolitics of assessment works in the daily lives of schools under pressure to increase the pass rate at almost any cost. The pressure runs top-down from the minister to the officials to the provinces and their MECs through the officials to the principal and her/his colleagues to the parents and children. I have seen how teachers burn out and learners tune out because of this unrelenting pressure.
What we also know is how organisations behave when put under pressure to increase performance outcomes without a corresponding investment of resources to achieve them: they take shortcuts. This organisational behaviour is as true in the corporate world as it is in the world of education.
Shortcuts often come with dubious ethical and, in the case of schools, educational practices. In schools, you drop difficult subjects like accountancy and replace them with easy-to-pass ones like tourism. You remove physical science from your offerings. You move your learners en masse to mathematical literacy rather than mathematics. You hold back learners in grades 10 or 11 until you can no longer do so: learners are only allowed to fail once in a phase — the FET phase includes grades 10, 11 and 12. If you failed once you must be promoted if you fail again. That explains why a healthy chunk of grade 12 learners who will write this year are YIP (year-in-phase) candidates, which simply means they failed twice already. (Journalists, please do your job and ask the minister how many YIP learners are in grade 12 every year.)
When you dig deeper, you find that there is a built-in assessment design that enables tens of thousands of students merely to get over the line. The first two or three questions in every examination are intentionally simple so that if you did well in that first set for, say, papers 1 and 2 of mathematics, you can easily achieve the minimum pass mark of 30%. In other words, the later and more challenging questions 4 and 5 can be avoided because those are really for the top learners in mainly the upper quintile schools. Here’s the deal: both officials and teachers tell grade 12s all the time to only concentrate on those easy questions with the logic that not only do they pass as individual learners, but the schools average pass rate goes up as well. As a strategy to pass, fine. But is this a good education? No.
I used to be critical of these practices because it denies young people a solid education that is both challenging and expands the horizons of their knowledge. Less so now. Because until we find ways of equalising the resources available to all schools we should pause judgment on those schools and teachers who try to get learners over the line with the meagre resources at their disposal.
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