Numbers way up but percentages lag behind in the 2024 Makhanda matric results

By Ashley Westaway

In January 2024, the city’s education community adopted a vision statement: “By 2028, Makhanda emerges as the leading academic educational centre and city in South Africa and is recognised as such, thereby affording all local children and young people the benefit of good quality and relevant education at pre-school, primary, secondary and tertiary levels.”

This analysis of the performance of our schools and students in the 2024 National Senior Certificate examinations gauges the extent to which we have made progress towards reaching this ambitious objective over the past twelve months. The methodology that I use for the annual review of matric results is balanced and comprehensive in that it uses a variety of indicators, involving both percentages and numbers, and it considers both the quantity and quality of local performance.

The most appropriate starting point for an analysis of Matric results is the cohort size. The size of the cohort indicates the ability of the local schooling system to retain its learners and prevent their drop-out.

In my opinion, the most impressive statistic of all that is presented in this analysis is the retention rate achieved in Makhanda in 2024.

883 young people sat the exams in local public schools in October/ November. This translates into a retention rate of 74%. In other words, out of every four children who were enrolled for Grade 1 in 2013, three wrote the NSC examinations last year.

As a city, we have come on in leaps and bounds over the past five years in relation to retention. In 2020, only 540 local students wrote their final examinations, representing a 45% retention rate. The comparison provides us with clear assurance that public schools in Makhanda, across the length and breadth of our city, have improved significantly in the recent period.

337 more young people progressed all way through primary and secondary schooling to reach Matric in 2024 than five years earlier. The retention rate in Makhanda has literally skyrocketed over this brief period from 45% to 74%. The significance of our retention performance is underlined when considering that the national statistic in this regard is 62%. Our city is therefore 12 percentage points higher than the South Africa as a whole.

In 2020, the fee-paying sector enrolled 172 matriculants, whilst last year the tally crept up to 180. By contrast, in 2020 the fee-exempt sector registered 368 matriculants and by last year, the total leapt up to 703.

In other words, the number of matriculants in the fee-exempt sector (comprising Khutliso Daniels,
Mary Waters, Nathaniel Nyaluza, Nombulelo, Ntsika and TEM Mrwetyana) almost doubled. Numbers have increased significantly at each of the six aforementioned schools.

As a city, we thus owe the fee-exempt schools, both primary and secondary schools, a great debt of gratitude for having enabled the massive improvement in learner retention.

In order to understand how we have improved the retention rate from 45% to 74% in five years, we must in fact turn attention to primary schooling. Final year Rhodes University Bachelor of Education (BEd) students assess the comprehension ability of Grade 4 learners in our public schools on an annual basis, under professional management.

The 2023 and 2024 studies have shown that Makhanda is considerably more literate than South Africa at large. The most basic foundations of academic education are literacy and numeracy. A prerequisite for progression to matric is functional literacy. Our primary schools are doing a good job in teaching our children to read, write and comprehend. This success is directly reflected in the surging higher numbers of Makhanda matriculants.

Overall performance indicators for Makhanda matric performance:

The overall pass rate for the city’s public schools in 2024 was 82%. This constitutes a marginal performance improvement on the 2023 city pass rate of 80%. Because of the larger-than-ever cohort size in 2024, the pass rate of 82% translated into 720 local students successfully obtaining their NSC. This is the first time ever that we reached and surpassed the milestone figure of 700 passes.

Again, I urge the readers to look at the improvement in numbers in this regard over the past five years. The number of passes went from 432 in 2020, to 550 in 2021, the mid-600s in 2022 and 2023, and now up to 720 in 2024.

My general sense of matric results is that too much emphasis is placed on percentages, at the expense of numbers. Given that a NSC is a prerequisite for securing employment, it is wonderful that there are almost 300 more young people who obtained this crucial qualification in 2024 than in 2020.

A clear highlight of the 2024 is the wonderful performance of Victoria Girls and Graeme College. VG obtained a 100% pass rate for the fifth successive year; it was one of only five schools in the province that achieved this feat.

On behalf of the entire community of Makhanda, I would like to commend Warren Schmidt and the rest of the outstanding leadership team for having navigated the past five years decisively, inclusively and strategically.

The situation at Graeme College has been somewhat different. The 2022 results at the school were disappointing. Instead of denying the challenges, Kevin Watson signalled to his staff, in no uncertain terms, that academic achievement is a priority at the school. He instituted a turnaround strategy that has been effective and impactful.

We are enormously privileged in Makhanda to have schools of excellence across the board, with VG and Graeme leading the way.

Our fee-exempt schools have had to absorb much greater numbers of learners over recent years. Thus it is unrealistic to expect them to seamlessly produce improved pass rates. Yet, the performance of the no-fee sector over recent years, and especially in 2024, has generally been very good. Special mention here
should go to Mzwandile Kleyi and the Nathaniel Nyaluza collective. In 2020, the school facilitated only 25 passes, but by 2024 as many as 56 young people left the school with their NSCs secured. During this period, the pass rate increased from 63% to 85%. Nathaniel Nyaluza was the first public high school for black learners in the former Cape Province. It has a proud history, and Mr Kleyi is in the process of restoring it to its glory days.

It is also noteworthy that Khutliso Daniels produced a pass rate in the 90s for the second successive year. What this shows is that its 2023 performance was not a flash in the pan! Radio Mcuba has built a formidable team at the school. Khutliso’s results underline his immense value to our city as a leader and team-builder.

The picture is by no means universally positive. The national pass rate announced on Monday was 87%. Therefore, we are five percentage points behind the country as a whole in relation to this indicator, which, of course, is the indicator that the media and the public obsess about.

The main statistical reason for Makhanda’s relatively poor pass rate is the continued poor performance at Mary Waters. Since the departure of Faith Coetzee several years ago, there have been leadership challenges at the school. It is a difficult institutional environment in that there are cultural, language and union dynamics, amongst others, that present in a uniquely complex way at Mary Waters. It is simply essential, for the sake of our city, that we find ways to deal effectively with the issues so that we can reach parity with the national pass rate.

School-by-school breakdown of results:

The most important indicator of a quality pass is to obtain the Bachelor level since this enables students to apply for bachelor’s degree study at a tertiary institution. When I started doing this analysis, a decade ago, Makhanda consistently obtained between 150 and 200 Bachelor passes, with most of these being generated by the fee-paying sector. We breached the 200 mark for the first time in 2018 and the 300 mark for the first time in 2021. Performance in relation to Bachelor attainment in the city from 2021 – 2023 was stable. It is thus most gratifying and encouraging to report that the city’s Bachelor tally for 2024 was 377.

Over a decade, we have doubled our Bachelor numbers. Percentage wise, the two schools that delivered outstanding quality were Victoria Girls (VG) and Graeme College. 90% of the VG 2024 cohort obtained
Bachelor level passes, whilst 76% of the Graeme students achieved this significant feat. In other words, VG and Graeme produced both excellent quantity and quality in 2024.

Numbers-wise, Ntsika matched VG with 74 Bachelors. This is a new record number of Bachelors for Ntsika. 2024 was Thobile Ncula’s first full year as principal at Ntsika. We commend him for having restored the school’s pass rate and facilitated a record number of Bachelor’s in his maiden year.

Nombulelo delivered the third-highest number of Bachelor passes, with 72.

Makhanda is home to Rhodes University, and our university is home to the people of this resilient and inclusive city. The better quality of passes now being produced is translating into increasing numbers of local students being accepted for full-time study at Rhodes. Very pleasingly, a significantly increased
number of the 2024 acceptances are for Pharmacy, Science and Commerce degrees, indicating better quality in Mathematics performance.

As with the pass rate however, we need to acknowledge that our Bachelor pass rate, at 43%, lags behind the national number of 48%.

School-by-school Bachelor performance:

In summary, 2024 was a year when all the numbers (cohort size, passes, Bachelors) surged to record highs, but then we generally slipped behind the national percentages. The exception here is retention, where Makhanda was comfortably ahead of the national percentage in 2024. This exception explains why all the number of passes and Bachelors smashed previous city records. But in order for us to lay claim to the coveted title of ‘best education city in South Africa’, we will have to work hard at further improving our pass rate and Bachelor pass rate.

Dr Ashley Westaway is the general manager of Gadra Education