Thebe Mabanga
Basic education director-general Matanzima Mweli paid tribute to the matric Class of 2025 on Monday for its resilience, likening the cohort to an “abandoned Baobab tree”, known for its ability to withstand adverse conditions. The Class of 2025 achieved an 88% pass rate.
Mweli said that the group, which started school in 2014, had to transition to high school in 2020 and 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, when learning was disrupted.
Reduced contact time meant they spent 2021 to 2023 rebuilding exam muscle, or “catching up”, and have now emerged triumphant with a record pass rate.
There were 764,014 full-time candidates — about 40,000 more than in 2024 — while there were 137,776 part-time candidates, down from 155,948 the year before.
Mweli said the reduction in part-time candidates showed learners had faith in the system and preferred to repeat full-time to improve their chances of success.
Over the past five years, the education system has grown from supporting 12 million learners to 13.7 million, he said.
But the number of teachers and schools has not kept pace with this growth, with 613 new schools built over the period and 6,500 additional teachers, bringing the total to 474,432 teachers.
Mweli highlighted the increased uptake of technical subjects as a welcome development, with subjects such as technical graphics and design being taken up by more than 4,000 additional learners.
He noted that technical subjects are “for now and the future” and are no longer being viewed as being for those who are not academically gifted. He said that each of the country’s 889 circuits should have a technical high school.
But the results also showed a worrying trend: a decline in the number of passes by grant recipients.
The DG noted that learners reach matric at 18 — the age at which the child support grant falls away — and losing the grant at such a critical stage may prove decisive. He said 44,000 learners were no longer receiving the grant in their matric year.
To mitigate this, he suggested the criteria may have to be tweaked so that “as long as you are in school, you receive the grant,” which would require a “sacrifice” by the country’s taxpayers.
The matric exam is a complex national operation, second only to national and local government elections. About 11 million question papers are used across 6,948 centres.
Apart from the stress and trauma of events like Covid, other challenges the department had to deal with included water and electricity disruptions, inclement weather and protests, which were kept to a minimum last year.
INSIDE EDUCATION
