Preceding last week’s televised announcement of the 2005 matric results was a programme called Shift. With wonderfully ironic aptness, the subject for discussion that day was modelling. One caller asked what school subjects she should take to prepare herself for a career as a model. The studio panel’s answer was that there aren’t any such subjects.
Inadvertently, this interchange put a finger very precisely on what has become a key question to ask of the matric exam: Who exactly is it for? And the programme as a whole, with its focus on a career defined by glitzy and glamorous appearance, provided an appropriate prelude to the matric show that followed, starring Minister of Education Naledi Pandor.
For sheer slickness of presentation, the show could hardly be faulted. Even so, for the second year in a row, Pandor’s style provided a refreshing quality of thoughtfulness relative to the incredible razzmatazz with which her predecessor, Kader Asmal, used to spearhead the matric extravaganza. This year she had some cause to be even more thoughtful, in that the overall pass rate declined by 2,4% — down to 68,3% compared with 2004’s 70,7%.
Yet, despite some media hysteria, so small a decline is scarcely a national calamity, especially because some other statistics provided reasons for applause. More pupils wrote the exam than in 2004; six provinces registered higher gross numbers of passes; and there was an increase in passes both in maths and science at the higher grade, for example.
But the major difference between Pandor and Asmal in their treatment of the results is that the current minister is far more nuanced and careful in the claims she makes for what the results mean. Where Asmal used an improbably soaring pass rate — reaching a high of 73% in 2003 — to make equally improbable claims about the robust health of the whole school system, Pandor is far more subtle.
At one point, she even tried to counter the traditional matric hype and educationally dubious weight put on the exam. Noting that ”South Africans keenly observe the matriculation exams and … the results are used as a means of assessing our progress”, she went on to say that she ”holds the view that we should be watching the entire education system with the same keen interest”.
That makes perfect educational sense: true quality must be measured by the whole schooling experience we offer our children, rather than by one exam written at the end of one year.
And yet, the suffocating political and social pressure generated by matric was evident in a certain slipperiness of manner that Pandor displayed with some statistics. The key figure here is the number of university entrance passes, and it is instructive to compare how she handled this hornet’s nest in her TV performance with the published media release of her address.
On TV, she provided only gross figures in this category: 86 531 received university entrance passes compared with 85 117 in 2004. And she flourished the fact that this is an ”upward trend” of those qualified to go to university.
But the press release also gave percentages: 17% of all 2005 candidates received university entrance passes — compared with 18,2% in 2004. And that, of course, is a downward trend.
If only 17% received university passes, that means 83% failed to reach this benchmark. And, once again, the inescapable question concerns what happens now to all these candidates, given the widespread perception (and reality) that a non-university matric pass carries very little value. Do they join the unemployed? Do they try to find funding to enrol at a further education and training college that might provide them with a vocationally orientated qualification and perhaps render them more employable?
And, for that matter, what happens to the 17%, too? A university entrance pass by no means offers automatic passage into any university or study programme of your choice. Universities have for a very long time been sufficiently, and rightly, sceptical about the quality of the matric exam to insist on their own battery of admission criteria beyond the matric certificate.
This scepticism still prevails in tertiary institutions: ”The question … remains whether the pass rates alone can attest to the quality of graduates produced,” Higher Education South Africa said in its response to the results this week.
All of which returns us to the central question: Who is this exam for? And the question will escalate in urgency by 2008, when a new school-leaving exam, the National Senior Certificate, is due to replace matric. Questions about who benefits from the school-leaving exam, and indeed the entire school experience, are inadequately addressed by the sort of rhetoric Pandor produced now and again during her TV performance: ”Our education system has come of age,” she announced, referring to the fact that the 2005 matric cohort is the first to have received a full 12 years of the new outcomes-based education the post-1994 government introduced. It would perhaps be better not to inquire too closely into what that really means.
The chief concern is that we are, inadvertently and quite against the grain of government policy, producing a two-tier education system — to put it bluntly, one for the wealthy minority and another, of hugely inferior quality, for the poor majority.
So it is certainly welcome that, for the first time, the government released the matric results disaggregated by school district — all 79 of them. The analysis by district is not yet complete, Pandor said, ”but we are convinced that we will gather information that will assist in formulating appropriate policies and interventions”.
If, as is likely, this analysis turns out to show alarming discrepancies in quality that have everything to do with income-based differences, then the government is going to have an uphill struggle in turning that scenario around. And even that will only be a start — other massive challenges, such as teacher development and training, still loom ominously.
But for greater transparency about the problems that face schools, and for attempting to reduce the traditionally hysterical matric hype, Pandor deserves applause. Now let us see if she can translate commendable verbal commitments into concrete action.