Why celebrate when a million kids don’t make it to matric every year?

Did you know that the national matric class of 2021 represents only 54% of the children who entered grade 1 12 years ago? The 76.4% of candidates who sat the National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations last year and passed constitute a fraction of that 54%, rather than of the entire cohort.

This is according to a 2019 parliamentary reply by minister of basic education Angie Motshekga who, using data from Stats SA’s 2018 general household survey, estimated that in 2018 53.8% of those aged 22-25 in SA had completed at least grade 12, representing a dropout rate of 46.2%.

In hard numbers — and controlling for the 163,967 part-time candidates who registered to write exams last year — this means that roughly 1.5million children entered the school system in 2010 but only 560,000 — a third — successfully matriculated 12 years later. That is an attrition rate of roughly 1-million young South Africans for every cohort passing through the schooling system.

Think about the devastating scale of this failure. An annual frenzy of celebration, debate, discussion and disappointment accompanies the announcement of the exam results. Those who passed the 2021 NSC exams — and who did so while navigating many complexities during a pandemic — have much to celebrate and be proud of. For the one-third of scholars who sat for the exams but did not pass, this period will be one of bitter disappointment and anxiety about the future.

Sadly, little ink is spilt reflecting on the fate of the 1-million young people who have been failed by our education system. That Motshekga and the provincial education MECs can parade one by one, smiling on television, to celebrate a 0.2 percentage point increase in the pass rate for the one-third of young people who managed even to make it to grade 12, without accounting for the 1-million lost to the system, is a national disgrace.

The department of basic education measures the dropout rate not by individual cohort but by age group in the general population, using Stats SA’s general household survey to calculate the percentage of people who have completed grade 12 up to seven years after they were of school-going age. This upwards age adjustment advantages the department by enabling it to capture matriculants from multiple cohorts at the same time, including pupils who take NSC supplementary exams in June the following year, as well as part-time candidates who write their matric past school-going age.

This inflation of the data prevents us from measuring school retention and matric pass rates at cohort level — in other words, we are unable to track the progress of SA’s school-going children from grade 1 to matric, national cohort by cohort. We have little information with which to assess repeat rates in each cohort (which data from the department shows are particularly high in grade 1); neither can we track repeat rates in any given cohort year by year, so that the minister, provincial departments and MECs for education may be held to account — not for broad outcomes seven years after learners have left the school system, but for inputs and processes within schools as well.

This year, a raft of ancillary concerns — both real and politically contrived — have occupied the public mind over the past week’s results-a-palooza. From whether publishing matric results in newspapers represents a violation of people’s privacy at a critical time, to a favourite among the more nostalgic who question whether a 30% subject pass rate is an accurate measurement of learner performance and readiness for the worlds of work and further study.

All of this is to say that the story of any given year’s matric results is never “where are the 1million?” but rather “what percentage of the minority who made it to their 12th year of school actually passed?”

This urgently needs to change.

SA has no minister of the unemployed — no political or government representatives held accountable in terms of their ability to divert the 1million young people away from a life of economic misery. At best, their plight will be conveyed to the desk of the minister of employment and labour, who, seized with matters of macroeconomic policy, will address it forgettably.

Neither will the 1-million be adequately represented at any multisectoral forums tasked with improving their prospects for economic participation; the unemployed enjoy no representation either at the National Economic Development and Labour Council or in parliament’s oversight committees.

The political principals responsible for basic education should not be allowed to escape responsibility for the two-thirds of every cohort they fail to deliver to on an annual basis. It’s time we changed our definition of success when it comes to SA’s matric results.