Reality check: The real story behind the matric results

The steep rise in the matric pass rate to a record high of 87.3% in 2024 has been hailed by the department of basic education (DBE) as evidence of a “system on the rise” and as proof that schooling in South Africa “is at its healthiest ever”. 

This rose-tinted view needs to be punctured. For though there is evidence of improvement — more learners are passing maths than ever before and the gap between rich and poor schools is closing — the big picture remains depressing.

The problem is that while there is a rising tide of matrics equipped with bachelor passes, they are not being sufficiently absorbed into the post-school education and training system or the labour market. And many of those who do make it onto university campuses are dropping out or taking longer to graduate because their schooling has left them insufficiently prepared.

The upshot is that universities are not meeting their graduate targets in engineering and other scientific fields. This has worrying implications for the economy. 

It helps to break the problem down. For starters, the proportion of matrics qualifying for university (the bachelor pass rate) has almost doubled in a decade, from 25.8% in 2015 to 47.8% in 2024 — the highest level yet. This represents an increase from about 166,000 to 337,000 pupils. A rising portion are from poorer no-fee schools (44.6% in 2024, up from 37% in 2023).

The government is celebrating the soaring bachelor pass rate, and the fact that the maths pass rate (with an exam pass mark of 30% or more) has jumped from 55% in 2022 to 63.5% in 2023, and hit 69.1% last year, but one would expect nothing else given that the proportion of matrics taking maths has been falling as weaker learners opt for the easier subject of maths literacy. This leaves a stronger cohort behind. 

Maths enrolments dropped from 43% of those who wrote matric in 2019 to 36% in 2024. At the same time, the gap between the number who wrote maths literacy over maths widened from about 77,000 in 2019 to 160,000 in 2023 and climbed further to 191,253 in 2024.

In 2024, maths enrolments were down 12,338 year on year. Nearly all the other gateway subjects are also down: life science (-5,853), physical science (-6,962), economics (-3,032) and accounting (-3,734). On the other hand, maths literacy enrolments rose by 19,504 from 2023’s figure. 

The Bureau for Economic Research’s (BER’s) analysis shows that in 2022, just 20% of the entire matric cohort passed maths (with a pass mark of 30% or above), which was no better than in 2009, more than a decade earlier. 

In 2023, and again in 2024, about 24% of those who wrote matric passed maths — a notable improvement but off a low base. (The progress in physical science has been less linear and more deeply affected by the pandemic. Last year, just 21.5% of those who wrote matric passed the subject compared with almost 25% in 2018.) 

What a travesty that despite the focus on promoting STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects over the past decade to try to address the skills shortage, South Africa has not been able to channel more than roughly one in five matrics towards passing physical science, or one in four to passing maths. 

At the more exacting 60% maths pass mark (the minimum required to cope with tertiary study in engineering, accountancy, computer science and commerce at top universities), the numbers remain woefully small, though they are edging up incrementally. 

In 2022, 12.5% of those who wrote maths got a pass mark of 60% or more — 4.6% of those who wrote matric in that year. In 2023, this rose to 15.7% of those who wrote maths and 5.9% of those who wrote matric. In 2024, it inched up further — to 17.7% and 6.3% respectively.

“The international evidence on growth suggests that the quality of schooling matters more than the quantity of schooling, and maths and science passes matter the most,”

—  Roy Havemann, a growth researcher at the BER

Given annual changes in the size of the matric cohort, despite the proportion of matrics taking maths dropping, the number of matrics passing it with 60% rose from 33,874 pupils in 2022 to 44,636 last year. While it is appalling that only 6% of matrics achieved high-level maths passes, at least we’re on a clear upward trajectory. 

Two major caveats remain, however. 

The first is that the reason for the significant improvement in matric results, especially the leap from 82.9% in 2023 to 87.3% in 2024, is not clear. The second is that better-quality passes are needed — the system just isn’t producing enough matrics with high-level maths and physical science passes to meet the available places at universities. 

“The international evidence on growth suggests that the quality of schooling matters more than the quantity of schooling, and maths and science passes matter the most,” says Roy Havemann, a growth researcher at the BER. “It is, therefore, vital that South Africa’s growth strategy includes raising the quality of education.” 

According to the 2022 department of higher education & training (DHET) report “Skills Supply and Demand in South Africa”, the annual intake of universities is typically less than half the number of bachelor passes. Moreover, about two-thirds of first-year university students are subject to admission requirements that include minimum marks, especially in maths and physical science.

At these minimum benchmarks the school system undersupplies what is needed. The report concedes that some universities are thus forced to relax their maths and physical science requirements to reach their enrolment targets (see box).

The upshot is predictable — the university system is failing to meet the DHET’s graduation targets in engineering and the sciences. This is extremely bad news for an economy that suffers from a dire shortage of engineers, scientists, actuaries, accountants and STEM teachers. These skills are critical for sustaining key industries and shoring up the country’s waning international competitiveness. 

According to the DHET’s latest annual report, the number of engineering graduates undershot its 2023/2024 target by 17.5% (2,541 students). In the natural and physical sciences the undershoot was 16% (1,814 students), with 15 of the country’s 26 universities reporting shortfalls of more than 20%.

The DHET pulls no punches in its annual report in blaming the DBE for this sad state of affairs, saying the targets are being missed due to “academically unprepared” students coming up from the school system. In engineering, it says, this caused a high dropout rate, while those students who did see their studies through took longer to graduate. 

This narrative is completely at odds with the DBE’s assessment of the “significant improvement” in maths results (and to a lesser extent physical science results) in recent years. 

South Africa’s grade 9 maths and physical science scores in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) do indeed show a fast rise between 2011 and 2019.

These improvements, says the DBE in its 2024 “NSC Examination Report”, are “indicative of improvements in learning and teaching across the curriculum”, given the interconnectedness of subjects. 

According to the report, the Timss results suggest that the skills of pupils “have moved up in a linear fashion” and that the upward trend in matric results is due largely to improvements in the grades below 12 achieved in previous years. 

Prior to 2019, the DBE ascribed these quality gains to better curriculum documents and training; more focused assessment practices; improved subject knowledge among newly graduated teachers; and more children having access to quality textbooks and pre-schooling. The jury is still out on most of these points.

Basic education director-general Hubert Mathanzima Mweli says the 4.4 percentage point spike in the matric pass rate between 2023 and 2024 was due to an “extraordinary and unprecedented” increase in both the intensity and duration of support programmes. 

But education researchers are sceptical.

“While there has been a dramatic improvement in the stability of secondary schools, which goes a long way to explaining the consistent improvement over the past decade, no programme I’m aware of explains the large gain in 2024,” says Wits University professor of education policy Brahm Fleisch. “It is unlikely that the school system could’ve improved so much, so quickly.”

He suspects that teachers are getting better at “gaming the system” — a suspicion shared by Prof Servaas van der Berg, the head of the Research on Socioeconomic Policy (Resep) unit in the department of economics at Stellenbosch University. 

Van der Berg is reluctant to take the matric results at face value given ongoing complaints from universities about the lack of preparedness and knowledge of new entrants. In addition, he points out that when the 2024 matric cohort was in grade 9 (in 2021), systemic testing put them six months behind previous grade 9 cohorts because of the effect of the pandemic on their schooling.

“All of this is quite worrying,” he says. “I suspect that teachers are increasingly teaching-to-the-test by, for instance, cutting parts of the grade 11 syllabus to focus on the grade 12 syllabus earlier.” 

Gabrielle Wills, a senior Resep researcher, also doubts that the spike in the 2024 matric results is because learners have suddenly had better access to support programmes. Her work with PhD student Rebecca Selkirk in the recent Resep research compilation, “School completion, the matric and post-school transitions in South Africa”, shows that the improvement in high-level maths and physical science results between 2019 and 2023 cannot be explained by compositional changes in factors such as age, gender, subject choice or school quintile. 

“However, we can’t rule out that educational progress among the learners who moved into matric last year is behind the strong 2024 matric results,” Wills concedes. In other words, it is possible that educational progress pre-pandemic, as reflected in South Africa’s improved performance in international tests of mathematics and literacy, may account for some of these gains.

Whatever the cause, the real issue is that the matric and bachelor pass rate is rising in the absence of economic growth. This means that thousands of matriculants are washing up on the shores of a post-school education and training (PSET) system and a job market that cannot absorb them. 

Wills calls the situation “South Africa’s Neet crisis”, noting that the proportion of recent matriculants (aged 15-24) classified by Stats SA as “not in employment, education, or training” (Neet) rose from pre-pandemic levels of about 45% to almost 50% at the start of 2024. 

This is partly because jobs for young, unskilled people are so hard to find. Her research shows that while four of every 10 economically active recent matriculants between 2014 and 2018 were employed, by the start of 2024 closer to three of every 10 were employed. In fact, the likelihood of a recent matriculant finding a job is about the same as it was eight to 10 years ago for someone who didn’t have a matric.

In the two decades to 2015, the PSET system — mainly public universities (54%), technical, vocational education & training colleges (25%) and private universities (12%) — played a strong role in absorbing young people and keeping them out of the Neet category. But since 2015, that enrolment trend has faltered, explains researcher and educational consultant John Kruger. 

He estimates that since 2015, enrolment growth in the PSET sector has fallen from 2.23-million students to 2.04-million. This is mainly because enrolments at technical and community colleges have nosedived while public universities have grown enrolments more slowly, well below the government’s targets. 

So, after being broadly in line with peer countries’ enrolment rates in the 1990s, South Africa now significantly lags other upper-middle-income countries. In 2021, South Africa’s tertiary gross enrolment rate was just 25.4% compared with 31.6% in India, 41% in Indonesia, 56.8% in Brazil and about 67.4% in China. In the innovation and knowledge-driven economies, such as the US and Finland, the rate is more than 70%. 

This is extremely worrying from an economic competitiveness perspective. But it’s not as if the higher education sector is underfunded. South Africa spends $12,497 per student per annum, equivalent to Italy and South Korea but below the average of $18,000 for Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) countries. However, at almost 1.5% of GDP, South Africa spends proportionately more on higher education than the OECD average, which is closer to 1%.

Between 2015/2016 and 2022/2023 South Africa’s real spending on PSET grew rapidly (by about 62%), allowing it to increase its share of total education spending from 22% to 30%. However, Kruger notes that the additional money went mainly to fund student living and study costs and did not enable significant growth in enrolments or quality in the sector. 

The shift within the higher education budget has been stark. In 2017/2018, the government allocated R15.4bn to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and R31bn to university subsidies. By 2023/2024 NSFAS’s budget had swollen more than threefold to R50.1bn, exceeding the R44.5bn allocated to universities in that year. 

So more than half of the DHET’s budget goes towards the grossly mismanaged NSFAS at a time when the bachelor pass rate is exploding, and slow economic growth and mounting debt has forced the National Treasury to cut real spending on PSET. 

Caught between declining government subsidies per student, caps on student enrolments and sharply rising input costs, the university sector has raised its fees. The government responded in 2023 by placing a cap on residence fees at universities and has initiated a process to regulate tuition fees as well, even though this would further weaken universities financially. 

If the Treasury sticks to its fiscal consolidation plan, the higher education budget is set to decline in real terms over the next three years. This will further limit the sector’s ability to absorb the rising numbers of matriculants.

Clearly, the situation is not sustainable. Something has to give. 

Granted, there is much that could be improved by better collaboration, management and planning by the DHET, NSFAS and the universities, but what is really needed is a major drive for cost efficiency by the universities combined with the complete redesign of the unsustainable fee-free model.

Greater improvement in matriculants’ university readiness in maths and physical science is also required, and the output of the education system should be better aligned with the needs of the job market. 

But smarter policies and better management can take the sector only so far. Above all, what is needed is faster economic growth. Without faster growth that permits some fiscal relaxation, it is hard to see how South Africa will either expand PSET enrolments or dent youth unemployment. But, of course, South Africa’s weak education system is itself a cap on growth.

There is little doubt that improving the education system is fundamental to faster growth and job creation; that without a quantum improvement in the quality of school passes, especially in subjects such as maths, South Africa will be unable to fuel a modern, fast-growing economy. 

Fixing education has never been more imperative. 

Harsh trade-offs

Some of the weaker universities are being forced to relax their minimum maths and physical science entry requirements to reach their enrolment targets, given that the school system is not producing enough high-level matric passes in these subjects. 

A stronger university, such as Stellenbosch University, which is heavily oversubscribed relative to its enrolment cap, as set by the DHET, has effectively raised its 2025 maths selection requirement to about 65% for most BCom degrees.

This is not because of low confidence in the academic quality of matriculants, says Stellenbosch University COO Prof Stan du Plessis, but as “an instrument of enrolment planning”.

In other words, if the university enrolled every applicant who scored 60% and above for maths it would exceed its enrolment cap and be penalised financially. The tragedy is that the university has the capacity to take more students scoring between 60% and 65% for maths but the DHET’s subsidies would not extend to cover them.

The immediate cause of the problem is the enrolment cap but the deeper problem is both fiscal and managerial. 

“On an international comparison we are well funded,” says Du Plessis. “The allocation of the funding is, however, poor and rewards inefficiency. The financial planning around the subsidy is also poor and causes significant instability. At the same time, more than half of the DHET budget is spent very poorly on NSFAS. So we have real problems, but they can all be addressed with proper management by the DHET and the universities.” 

Bisseker is an economics writer and researcher at the BER