Western Cape MEC for education Debbie Schäfer said the 2019 matric results showed the provinces schools were succeeding in helping to close the ‘inequality gap’.
Schäfer said in a statement that the results ‘indicate that since 2009, significant progress has been made in improving the education system and learner outcomes in this province, particularly in our poorer schools’.
She said: ‘Over the past 10 years, schools in Quintiles 1-3 (no-fee schools) have improved their pass rate by 16.7 percentage points from 56.7% in 2009 to 73.6% in 2019. Quintile 4 and 5 schools (fee-paying schools) have increased only slightly during this same period with 2.4 percentage points from 83.3% to 85.7%.
‘I acknowledge that there is still a 12.1 percentage point difference between our no-fee and fee paying schools – however, it is a great improvement from the 26.4% in 2009 when this current [Democratic Alliance] government took over.
‘Similarly, the quality of these passes has also improved. Quintile 1-3 schools have increased their Bachelor pass rate from 10.4% in 2009 to 27.4% in 2019. This is a 17 percentage point increase compared to a 9.8 point increase in Quintiles 4 and 5.’
Schäfer said she was ‘delighted with our highest ever bachelor pass rate of 43.6%, a close second to Gauteng’.
The Western Cape, with over 50 000 candidates, had ‘maintained an above 80% pass rate, achieving an increased percentage pass rate from 81.5% in 2018 to 82.3% in 2019’.
The Western Cape also claims the top three candidates in the country overall, and the top two in mathematics.
In a separate statement, Democratic Alliance (DA) Shadow Minister of Basic Education Nomsa Marchesi said that while the government was ‘celebrating an all-time high matric pass rate of 81.3%, the DA can reveal that the real pass rate is in fact 38.9%’.
Marchesi said: ‘In 2017, a total of 1 052 080 learners were enrolled in grade 10, yet only 409 906 learners eventually passed matric last year. This means only 38.9% of grade 10 learners actually wrote and passed matric.
‘This is for the most part due to an extraordinarily high drop-out rate, which means that hundreds of thousands of learners are denied the chance to write matric, let alone pass it. This is an indication of a dismally failing system, not a functional and successful one.’