As the inevitable hand-wringing and criticism of SA’s education system plays out after the release of the national senior certificate (NSC) results last week, it is worth noting some of the successes of the class of 2019.
For a start, last year’s matrics achieved more bachelor’s passes than ever before: 36.9% of those who wrote the NSC received a pass that allows them to apply for university — up from in 28.4% in 2014.
A bachelor’s pass requires a minimum of 30% in the language of learning and teaching at the educational institution, as well as 40% in the pupil’s home language, and 50% in four or more subjects. An ordinary pass, in contrast, requires a minimum of 30% for four subjects and 40% for three subjects, including the pupil’s home language.
The improved numbers for 2019 reflect not just a steady increase in the quality of NSC passes, but also in the number of bachelor’s passes awarded.
According to the basic education department’s 78-page technical matric exam report: "Youths qualifying for entry into a bachelor’s programme at a university have increased from around 100,000 in 1994, to around 160,000 in recent years."
This, it says, is "a 4.3% increase in bachelor’s level passes a year".
The percentage of pupils who passed their final exams hit a record in 2019 — 81.3%, compared with 62.6% in 2008.
According to experts, the data shows that the improvement is due to township schools slowly beginning to close the performance gap with schools in wealthy areas.
Reasearch from Prof Martin Gustafsson, a member of the Research on Socio-Economic Policy (ReSep) programme at Stellenbosch University, shows that in 2002 white youths were 23 times more likely to obtain high marks in maths than black African youths were. But in 2016 the figure narrowed to seven times more likely, which Gustafsson says is due partly to improved results from rural and township schools.
The department of basic education’s matric report says: "The number of quintile 1-3 [no-fee] schools performing at an overall pass percentage of 80% and above increased from 1,961 in 2018 to 2,484."
But matric marks are not designed to show improvements or declines in the education system, says Gustafsson. "The grade 12 examinations are in fact not a terribly accurate measure of improvement. The examinations were not designed for this; they were designed to give students certificates of achievement."
However, when taken as a whole, "the evidence points to the outcomes of the schooling system improving at a relatively satisfactory pace", he says. "I know many do not see things this way. We have been catching up."
To illustrate his point, Gustafsson points to the Trends in International Mathematics & Science Study (Timss), which is conducted every five years in about 50 countries. In SA it covers 8,000 pupils from the poorest to the wealthiest schools, and shows a vast improvement in SA’s maths scores between 2014 and 2019.
"In grade 9 mathematics in the Timss programme, we are now slightly below Botswana, and Botswana too is an underperformer relative to that country’s general level of development," says Gustafsson.
"But 15 years ago the gap between us and Botswana was huge. We’ve been catching up, and the speed with which we have improved in programmes such as Timss is on par with the fastest improvers in the world."
Sarah Gravett, dean of the education faculty at the University of Johannesburg, says there were big improvements in the percentage of pupils in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape passing matric in 2019.
"These are also provinces with high levels of poverty. Poverty has a major impact on achievement in school," she says.
And there lies the rub: despite the continual improvement in results, the best performers still come from wealthy schools.
Education expert Mary Metcalfe says the 2019 matric results do indicate progress in reducing the performance gap between schools serving poor and wealthy communities. But she adds: "Poverty still impacts overwhelmingly on learner performance."
And this is the reality that’s less evident in the department’s matric results presentation.
The technical report’s raw figures show that 96,976 of those eligible for admission to bachelor studies come from no-fee schools, against 78,037 from fee-paying schools.
But considered in the broader context, the numbers are still disappointing. More than 78% of schools in SA are no-fee institutions — yet they produced only 54% of bachelor’s passes. The 21% of schools where parents pay fees — ranging from R13,000 to R40,000 a year — produced 44% of all university passes.
There’s more spin: 2019 is the first year that the number of distinctions achieved per subject is not recorded in the department’s technical report.
There is also no data comparing the quality of passes achieved by pupils at fee-paying schools with those at no-fee schools. A bachelor’s pass at an average of 50% is clearly not equivalent to an average 70% pass. And that difference is important.
Stellenbosch University’s ReSep programme monitored the university careers of matrics who finished school in 2008 and found their average matric pass mark was an accurate predictor of whether they would obtain their degrees.
A pupil with an 80% matric average has an 80% chance of finishing university within six years. An average of 60% means a 65% chance of completing a degree, and a 50% pass equates to a chance of just 50%.
The study concludes that "a select minority of matric learners manage to obtain university qualifications. Significant inequalities in university outcomes between race groups and across geographical space also remain evident … University success is strongly influenced by school results."
One sign of the skewed quality of passes is that 306 no-fee schools achieved a 100% pass rate. By the FM’s calculation, that represents just 6% of no-fee schools. By contrast, about one in five fee-paying schools recorded a 100% pass rate.
There’s an unavoidable racial dimension in these outcomes too, due to the apartheid legacy of inequality. The majority of black pupils attend the poorer-performing no-fee schools, whereas white pupils will likely be at independent or fee-charging government schools, according to an Institute of Race Relations study released this week.
Other research points to the fact that fee-paying schools produce the kind of matric passes that lead to successful professional qualifications.
A pupil with an 80% matric average has an 80% chance of finishing university within six years ... A 50% pass equates to a chance of just 50%
Research by education economist Nic Spaull shows that just 200 schools, 175 of which charge "significant" fees, produced almost all mathematics distinctions in 2018.
"In 2018, the top 200 high schools in the country had more students in matric achieving distinctions in mathematics (80%+) than the remaining 6,600 combined," he writes. "Put differently 3% of SA high schools produce more mathematics distinctions than the remaining 97% put together."
What also emerges in the 2019 matric results is a decline in mathematics metrics.
"The standout trend for me is the across-the-board decline in the number of students taking and passing maths. There is an 11% decline nationally," Spaull says on Twitter.
He adds that 14,500 fewer pupils passed maths, "meaning 14,500 fewer can study engineering, commerce, law, medicine and science".
Gustafsson similarly voices concern at the results in certain subjects in grade 12 — "particularly mathematics, which is widely used by universities for determining eligibility to enter certain programmes".
"At face value, there appears to have been a 10% drop in 2019 in the number of students achieving a mark of 40% or more in mathematics. The same can be said of students passing higher thresholds, though that is not published in the official report."
He does, however, acknowledge that the 2019 maths exam was harder than in previous years.
"In the analysis I do for the department of basic education, I have confirmed, through analysis of trends in demographically stable and well-performing schools, that the 2019 mathematics examination must have been exceptionally difficult."
A further aspect that the education department’s report fudges is how boys in school perform worse than girls do.
The report says that "boys continue to outperform girls and achieved a slightly higher pass rate of 82.8%, compared to girls achieving at 80.1%".
But this ignores the fact that for every 100 girls who reach matric, only 80 boys do, according to a new report by Spaull and Nwabisa Makaluza that analyses data from 1995 to 2018.
The higher male dropout rate — a global phenomenon — is thought to result from socialisation and assessment methods.
"Given the way girls are, the way they are socialised, the way we organise schools and the way we assess kids, girls do better than boys," Spaull says.
It’s yet another element to factor into an assessment of matric performance. And so, 25 years after the end of apartheid, it remains the case that your chances of success are largely circumstantial: if you want a quality senior certificate pass, you want to be a white female living in a middle-class suburb.
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