Highest Number of Matric Entrants in 2015, But Pass Rate Drops

MIDRAND – While the number of grade 12 enrolments in 2015 was the highest in the history of South Africa’s basic education system, almost 800,000, the pass rate dropped more than five percent over the past year, according to the Minister of Education Angie Motshekga.

At the same time it was announced that the top achiever in the country of the 799,306 students writing the National Senior Certificate was Andrew Tucker of the South African College Schools in Cape Town. Tucker came out on top despite missing six months of school this year after being diagnosed with the auto-immune disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Tucker and the other top students were feted by Motshekga at an event on Monday. He plans to study medicine at the University of Cape Town, according to news reports.

The overall pass rate dropped from 75.8 percent in 2014 to 70.7 percent, Motshekga said on Tuesday.

Motshekga said the department had faced much criticism over the years regarding the quality of the national assessments, and therefore the standards for the class of 2015 were much higher, according to news reports

The Western Cape had the highest pass rate of the nine provinces (84.7 percent, the only province to improve on its 2014 pass rate), while the poorest-performing provinces were Eastern Cape (56.8 percent) as well as Limpopo (65.9 percent) and KwaZulu-Natal (60.7 percent), both down nine percent on 2014. Those three provinces also had 53 percent of the country’s pupils.