The celebration of the 82% matric pass rate for the class of 2023 may not be true.
Congratulations to the students who have passed their Matric exams at various levels. Welcome to a new chapter in your life. Do your best! If you have failed or not done well, get up and try again, that’s life! Everyone has failed at some point and has to start all over again. You are not unique or stupid, you failed, well done for trying, now get up and do it again.
The 82% matric pass lie
The 82% matric pass celebration is another sham that the Department of Basic Education is pulling on South Africans. The Premier of Gauteng, Panyaza Lesufi, spoke of the highest figure since 1994; is it really the ?
The government is doing everything it can to burnish its image and portray itself as people who are achieving good results, but we all know that’s not true. The 82% matric pass rate is another lie fabricated by the Ministry of Basic Education.
The government has failed to create a thriving environment for students and teachers in urban and rural schools because of a lack of service delivery.
- Overcrowded classrooms that overwhelm teachers
- No water, electricity, and sanitation facilities
- Insufficient funding for schools
- Underqualified teachers
- Terrible school infrastructure
- Poor roads and students risking their lives by crossing flooded rivers to school.
- There is a lack of communication technology for these schools to participate in the 4IR generation.
- The socio-economic status of the parents is caused by high unemployment and economic marginalization by the government. Most students drop out of school to look for work.
- Teachers in rural schools have to teach in multiple grades, i.e. they have to teach different subjects and different grades in one class. This has a serious impact on teachers as they have to plan lessons for each day and each lesson, allocate their time to teach the different grades, carry out assessment tasks for learners, and maintain discipline. Teachers usually resort to abbreviated curricula and rarely adapt the curriculum by using contextualized examples.
- Loadshedding seriously affects learning and teaching.
- To what extent is R350 enough to procure stationery, school uniforms, data, and electricity?
These are some of the things where this government is failing. So how can we celebrate the bogus 82% matric pass rate when teachers and learners in rural and township schools are subjected to such atrocities?
The Ministry of Basic Education has fudged figures to make it appear that the results are true, and this is how:
The pass mark for basic education is 30%! However, the pass mark for higher education is 40%. So the Ministry of Basic Education is pushing the 30% students into the 40% environment without bothering about the students’ education to get them from 30 to 40. Anyone who sets the bar so low is serving the government, not society.
The 2023 high school graduating class entered the school system in 2012, let us crunch the numbers:
- Grade 1 students in 2012 = 1,208,973
- Grade 12 students who wrote matric in 2023 = 717,377
- Missing students = 491,596
Now, if you calculate the 2023 pass rate based on the original number of Grade 1s, you come up with a pass rate of about 55%. We have not even counted how many passed with 40%.
This is what the government is celebrating: Mediocrity and failure.
30-40% level students should enter the labor market after their university education, how are we supposed to develop and prosper as a society if we are a society with 30% educational capacity in the job market? This is the reason why the economy remains in the hands of 11% of the population while the rest of the population struggles for the crumbs of the economy and land. SouthA is run by leaders with 30% academic skills, and these are the people we are entrusting with the future of this country.