As anyone who has ever written matric would know, getting six distinctions is impossible. Yet in spite of this incontrovertible fact, several local pupils have achieved the impossible, five pupils in Grahamstown schools have even gone so far as to reach way beyond impossible and achieve eight distinctions.
As anyone who has ever written matric would know, getting six distinctions is impossible. Yet in spite of this incontrovertible fact, several local pupils have achieved the impossible, five pupils in Grahamstown schools have even gone so far as to reach way beyond impossible and achieve eight distinctions.
It's incomprehensible. We don’t know how you did it, but we do know that you deserve our congratulations and our respect. Well done!
However, it is not only the super-achievers who deserve our admiration. To achieve even one distinction or even a matric pass is worthy of praise – after all, only 58.1% of the pupils who wrote the exams in this province passed.
It is clear from the latest matric results that there are some centres of excellence in the Eastern Cape where the pass rate is almost perfect and the number of distinctions is quite overwhelming. It is equally clear that some of the less privileged schools in the Makana area are making a massive effort to overcome gross disadvantages inherited from the apartheid era.
However, it is just as evident that the Eastern Cape Education Department is doing a miserable disservice to the people of this province by ensuring that our youth fall further and further behind the rest of this country. The figures are appalling.
The Eastern Cape pass rate for 2011 was only 58.1% – well below the national rate of 70.2% – and an astonishing 24% behind the Western Cape. While the rest of the country improved from 67.8% to 70.2%, the Eastern Cape, which was already the poorest performing province, took a step backwards from 58.3% in 2010 to 58.1% in 2011.
It is high time the Eastern Cape Education Department was cleared of lazy officials who do nothing to contribute towards the future of this country. There are, however, significant concerns about our education system at national level – despite the welcome improvement in the national pass rate.
What this improvement masks is the fact that the most urgently required subjects – maths and science – are not doing well at all. The pass rates in those two subjects, 46.3% and 53.4% respectively, are much lower than those of all the other subjects. The time to start studying for the 2012 matric exams is now.
