Cape Town – The Democratic Alliance has asked Education Minister Angie Motshekga for an investigation into the high school drop-out rate, arguing that it may have been manipulated to boost matric results.
"Close analysis of the 2016 matric results reveals a very high 'drop-out rate', leading to speculation that some learners may have been 'culled' to inflate the matric pass rate," DA basic education spokesperson Gavin Davis said.
Davis said figures from the department showed that 1 100 877 learners enrolled for Grade 10 in 2014, but only 610 178 enrolled for Grade 12 in 2016.
"This means that 44,6 percent of learners either dropped out of the system altogether, or remain stuck in Grade 10 and 11."
Davis said the drop-out rate was highest in the Northern Cape at 54.4 percent, followed by North West at 52.7 percent and Free State at 51.6 percent, and cited this as an instance of how the focus on matric results obscured the wider failings of South Africa's education system.
"This is because the pass rate is expressed as a percentage of the learners who wrote, and doesn't take into consideration the learners who didn't make it to matric. But we need to remember that it is possible for a school, district or province to push up their pass rate simply by ensuring that fewer weaker learners write the matric exams."
DA MP Gavin Davis. Picture: Supplied
He noted that in the Free State in 2014, there were 55,293 learners enrolled in Grade 10 but in 2016 only 26,786 of those learners actually wrote matric.
"If we look at the number of learners in the Free State who obtained a matric pass (23,629) and divide them by the number of learners who enrolled in Grade 10 in 2014, we can calculate a 'real pass rate' of 42,7 percent."
Davis argued that when this was compared with figures in the Western Cape, it undermined the Free State's claim that it was the best performing province, and painted a far grimmer picture of the situation in both provinces than the official pass rate suggested.
In the Western Cape, there were 75,791 learners enrolled in Grade 10 in 2014 and of those, 50,869 wrote matric last year and 43,716 passed.
Davis said this suggested that in fact the true pass rate in the province was closer to 57,7 percent.
"In other words, the Free State's claim to be the best performing province (with a pass rate of 88,2 percent compared with the Western Cape's 86 percent) is misleading. Any assessment of performance must take into account the number of learners retained in the system. It is clear that, in the Free State, relatively fewer learners make it to matric, which is why the pass rate was high this year."
He said he had therefore written to Motshekga to demand an investigation into the high drop-out rate, and "specifically whether this was the result of learners being 'culled' by schools under pressure from districts and provincial education departments".