Focus on pass rate hides education crisis

It is unfortunate that official commentary on the matric results focuses exclusively on the pass rate. While the achievements of pupils and their teachers, often against considerable odds, must be acknowledged, the pass rate on its own disguises severe problems facing our schooling in at least two respects.

First, it ignores the many pupils who never get as far as matric. According to Stellenbosch academic Nic Spaull, 42% of pupils who were in grade 2 a decade ago never got to matric.

Second, the pass rate on its own does not differentiate between levels of passes. The numbers achieving bachelor or diploma-level passes matter greatly as they are required for tertiary study.

Access to postschool qualifications matter enormously because the skills acquired are gateways to meaningful employment.

Unemployment in SA now exceeds 38%. According to Stats SA, 42% of unemployed jobseekers in 2014 had no matric, while 34% of jobseekers had matric.

Unemployment among those with matric and a tertiary qualification was 14%. Only about 6% of all university graduates are unemployed.

Thus, possession of a basic matric slightly improves one’s chances of finding a job. Matric plus a tertiary qualification substantially raises the likelihood of being employed. The most important qualification for securing work is matric plus a university degree.

However, only 27% of 2016 matriculants achieved the bachelor pass required for entry to university. Lack of finance and high university failure rates mean only one-third of these will finally get a degree.

Spaull says the cumulative effect of these shortcomings is that for every 100 pupils who start school, only 4.5 get the university qualification that is the near guarantee of secure, quality employment.

Clearly, our education system is in crisis. Visible effort to identity solutions to the underlying problems is lacking. Too much attention seems to be focused on only modest gains in improving the matric pass rate by a few percentage points.

The need for more fundamental improvement is further highlighted when SA’s schooling is compared with other countries and to the changing dynamics of the global economy.

The shocking performance of our pupils compared to their peers across the globe and our own continent is reflected in international benchmark tests.

Our underperformance is even more sobering if one considers that even the countries that perform well in the tests are concerned that they are not doing enough for their children.

In a world of rapid change and increasing automation, policymakers globally are asking whether their pupils are acquiring appropriate skills for jobs in the workplace of the future.

The World Economic Forum suggests the world has only three to five years to adjust to the ways it “earns, learns and cares”.

It identifies key areas where educational change is needed as “early childhood education, future-ready curricula, a professionalised teaching workforce, early exposure to the workforce, digital fluency, robust and respected technical and vocational education, openness to education innovation and, critically, a new deal on lifelong learning”.

Few of these issues feature in narrow discussions about matric pass rates. “Lifelong learning”, for example, is a meaningless goal for those who never get to matric.

SA’s inadequacies are cruelly exposed in terms of “early exposure to the workplace” when, according to Stats SA, more than 1-million young people in the Eastern Cape alone live in households where nobody has ever worked.

Even if addressed with urgency, solving our numerous education problems will probably take decades. It will require appropriate policies, more money and new resources.

SA’s expenditure on education is already quite high by global standards. But our population is younger than richer countries and therefore there are comparatively more children to be educated.

Also, our education problems are more deep-rooted than those of most countries, so solving them will need a greater allocation of resources. It will require reprioritising existing resources and using what we have more efficiently.

There are wonderful examples of schools serving the children of poor and economically marginalised families that produce excellent outcomes with limited resources. Their achievements must become the national norm, not the exception.

This requires new vision, leadership and determination to tackle what are probably our biggest challenges.