Despite a great deal of fanfare which accompanied the release of the 2022 matric results, the reality is that South Africa’s basic education system is failing to prepare school leavers adequately for the job market. This is clearly reflected in the country’s dismal and persistently high youth unemployment rate. In the third quarter of 2022, youth unemployment for those aged 15 to 24 was 59.6%. This equates to approximately 3.5 million young people – out of a total cohort of 10.2 million young people – who are not employed, at school or enrolled in an institution of higher learning.
School disruptions in 2020 and 2021 led to a number of gloomy predictions which included a lower pass rate and fewer learners writing matric exams. Although neither of these predictions were realised – the pass rate was only marginally lower than the rate recorded in 2019 and more full-time learners wrote matric – new research has established that pandemic-induced school disruptions did indeed have a negative impact.
A report by Stellenbosch University’s Research on Socioeconomic Policy reveals significant losses in language and mathematics amongst foundation-phase learners in 2021. The report found that losses in maths were the largest with learners falling more than a year behind. Language losses were a little smaller, with learners losing around three-quarters of a year.
The researchers say addressing learning gaps that resulted during the pandemic have not been prioritised, including a deterioration in early-grade reading which will make it harder to achieve the national goal that all children are able to read for meaning by the age of 10.
The report says two policy areas require special attention: more time needs to be found for maths “to overcome the deficit that has accumulated during the Covid years”, while in language, “the big challenge is to ensure that reading has been mastered in the foundation phase”.
The pandemic exacerbated an already bad situation, say the researchers: low average marks were already evident in 2019 for grade 3 language and grade 9 maths with quintile 1 schools – the poorest schools – performing extremely poorly across all tests and grade levels. However, schools in quintiles 2, 3 and 4 also performed poorly. Schools in quintiles 1, 2 and 3 are classified as government no fee schools while schools in quintiles 4 and 5 are government fee paying schools, with quintile 5 schools being the most affluent.
Pointing out that maths and language are “gateway subjects, forming the basis for learning in all other subjects”, the researchers advise that additional time for catch up in these subjects should be made available even if it means reducing time allocations for other subjects or suspending non-core subjects. They have also called for the curriculum to be trimmed as a matter of urgency to give learners time to master the skills and concepts necessary to progress to subsequent grades.
Progression policies in the last few years have become even more lenient. Prior to the pandemic, learners who struggle would have repeated the year. The report says “system-wide reductions in repetition rates at all grade levels, but particularly in grades 10 and 11” is part of the explanation of why there were record numbers of learners writing matric exams in 2022.
It is to be hoped that South Africa’s high youth unemployment rate and poor educational outcomes weighs heavily on South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa when he delivers the annual State of the Nation Address later this week. He is expected to report back on the Basic Education Employment Intervention – part of the Presidential Employment Stimulus plan launched in 2020 – which has seen thousands of school assistants employed. The latest cohort of the more than 250 000 school assistants started in schools on 1 February with more expected to start working later in the year. Whether this initiative alone will provide the impetus to catch learners up with the learning time lost in 2020 and 2021 remains to be seen.
By Paul Esterhuizen, CEO of School Days
