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How did SA’s first ‘digital’ Model C school do in its first Matric?

Nikisha Baijan is a happy young lady this morning. Yesterday she discovered that she was one of just five students in Gauteng to achieve ten distinctions in her Matric exams, with scores above 90% in Accounting, Religion Studies, Mathematics Paper 3, Physical sciences, History and Mathematics.

What makes Baijan’s achievement all the more heartening is that she was a student at Sunward Park High School in Boksburg, which we wrote about late last year because it’s the first government school in the country to go ‘digital-only’. In her final year, Baijan didn’t touch a text book, all of her class materials were delivered via a tablet which it’s compulsory for all students to own.

Sunward Park is a former model C school, in which more than 90% of pupils come from disadvantaged backgrounds. There are around 1 230 pupils from Grades 8 to 12, most of whom come from Freeway Park or Van Dyke primaries. Both these schools have large catchment areas into the nearby townships.

Overall the school did very well in the matrics, beating the national and provincial averages by a considerable degree. Of 222 pupils who sat the exams, 219 passed – a rate of 98.64%. 58.4% of the pupils scored highly enough to achieve university entry, and there were 159 distinctions handed out. A further 79 students gained diploma passes.

While deputy head Enoch Thambo is obviously very happy with the results, he says that this is only a cautious endorsement of the school’s digital policy. On the one hand, he told htxt.africa, pupils like Baijan told him that tablet-ised textbooks were very useful for revising with. On the other, the school has had a series of good results over the last four years, with an even greater proportion of passes in 2011 and 2010.

“There are positive pointers that the experiment has been vindicated,” he says, pointing to improvements in scores for Physical sciences in particular, “And come 2014 we will start drawing logical conclusions.”

Anthea Naiken (2)
Anthea Naiken, one of Joburg’s star performers.

How does Sunward Park fit in to the national picture? In case you missed the results announcements yesterday, overall scores are up but the whole Matric process still has many critics.

According to Education Minister Angie Motshekga, the overall number of students who matriculated this year with a pass grade was 78.2%, or 439 779 out of 562 112. This is an increase of nearly 4.3% on last year, and beats the official government target of 75% by more than a year.

In a speech on Monday night, Motshekga singled out ‘gateway’ subjects like Maths and Physical Science for particular success, where the pass rates have gone up to 59.1% and 67.4% respectively, from 54% and 61.3% a year ago.

Critics, however, have pointed out that while the overall matric results are good, almost as many students drop out of school before taking their exams as get tested at the end of grade 12. The outspoken vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, Jonathan Jansen, wrote in The Sunday Times this week that results are “grossly misleading”.

“These pass rates are still calculated at a base of 30 percent in some subjects and 40 percent in others,” he said.

The South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SACCI) has also raised concerns. In a press statement issued today, SACCI CEO Neren Rau praised the 2013 cohort for their improved results, but cautioned that “SACCI however does remain concerned over the quality of the Matric certificate owing to the relatively low pass requirements. The Matric certificate should be a fundamental signal to the labour market that a school leaver can perform in at least a low-skilled position. Sadly this is no longer the case given a growing body of evidence of ill-equipped school leavers as reported by the business community.”

Motshekga did confront such comments in her speech.

“The sector needs to urgently reduce repetition and dropout  drastically. We need to take practical steps to address inclusivity and excellence,” the minister said, “Consistent with strengthening Curriculum implementation and providing quality education, the sector needs to continue with the support and monitoring of CAPS implementation. In addressing inclusivity and access, implementation of CAPS for Technical High Schools; South African Sign Language and the Incremental Introduction of African Languages.”

She also pointed out that the best performing provinces weren’t those that had access to the most funding.

“Contrary to what some would like the nation and the public to believe that our results hide inequalities, the facts and evidence show that the two top provinces (Free State and North West) are rural and poor”

Nic Spaull, a academic from Stellenbosch University who has written extensively on the ‘crisis’ in South African education raised concerns that outside of the Western Cape, markers for the Matric exams weren’t asked to sit competency tests before assessing papers. However, he did welcome government plans to move away from relying on Matric as the sole denominator of schooling success.

“On of the big problems that we have in South Africa is that it’s matric or nothing. If you leave school before matric, or if you reach matric but fail, there is no earlier qualification that you can fall back on and prove your educational status,” he says, “If there was a trustworthy, externally evaluated Grade 9 exam this would not be the case. The Minster has recently announced that the Department plans to introduce an external exam at Grade 9 in the next 3 years. This should be welcomed as a positive move in the right direction.”

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