The decline in the matric pass rate is worrying, Minister of Education Naledi Pandor said in Pretoria on Friday.
The country needed to increase the number of candidates for entry to higher education levels, she said.
”I have instructed the Department [of Education] to analyse the results of every school to establish exactly which schools are serial under-performers and also to find out which of our more able schools have begun to decline into complacency and mediocrity.”
The Democratic Alliance said the disappointing pass rate came as no surprise.
MP George Boinamo said: ”During the past year our country’s education system, and more importantly its learners, faced many challenges, all of which played a key role in the inability to improve on last year’s pass rate.
”This year we had problems like the public-service strike, which left thousands of learners all over the country desolate for days and caused many schools not to be able to complete the prescribed curriculum.
Pandor said several reasons were responsible for the decline in the matric pass rate.
She said that one was that teachers were not yet preparing learners for tough papers that needed high-level cognitive skills.
”All of us need to take learning and teaching far more seriously …,” she said.
She said another reason was that the national and provincial education departments were not administering and supporting the system with a high level of administrative efficiency.
She said one of the main concerns was that the poorest schools continued to perform badly.
Pandor admitted that teaching time was lost during the pubic-sector strike, but said many schools and teachers made an excellent effort to recover.
”While the recovery plan seems to have worked, not all of us took it seriously and missed the gains it could have brought to the learners.”
In closing, Pandor said if all South Africans resolved to make schools work, the country would have a much higher rate of success when it came to education.
‘Critically important area’
Meanwhile, the African National Congress (ANC) said on Friday that the decline in the general matric pass rate is concerning.
According to the Department of Education, the matric pass rate dropped for 2007 to 65,2% from 2006’s 66,5%, with the number of pupils eligible for university entrance also dropping.
Spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said this issue needed to be addressed urgently as it had a direct bearing on the country’s skills-development programme.
”The ANC has identified education and training as a critically important area on which we must concentrate as part of the process of the reconstruction and development of our country.”
The average pass rate at the matriculation level has risen from about 50% in the mid- to late 1990s, to 65% today.
”Although we appear to have made considerable progress, the challenge of continuing to improve the quality of education remains,” he said.
”Our primary response must be to assert that we will continue to give emphasis to the implementation of effective strategies that will support increased success at all levels of schooling,” said Ngonyama. — Sapa