Chairperson, the National Senior Certificate pass rate is arrived at by dividing the number of students who passed the exam by the number of students who sat for it. It is therefore a measure of quantity and not quality.
In these terms, our country saw an increase in the pass rate of 7,1% between 2009 and 2010. When I heard the results for the first time I thought that I was witness to the biggest educational fraud of the century. There was no rational explanation for this result; schooling was rudely interrupted by the World Cup, the public sector strike and an unusually high level of teacher absenteeism.
There was no evidence whatsoever of better teaching and certainly not on a scale to justify a jump of 7%. Some of it can be explained by doing more of what is normal, such as the spectacular increase in the number of part-time students who are then taken out of the statistics, and the slightly more generous adjustments by Umalusi, neither of which is illegal or unethical.
I suspect that the problem lies with the raw scores: poorly trained markers at poorly supervised marking centres. Mpumalanga has 17 marking centres and cannot be properly supervised, whilst the Western Cape has two marking centres, and the ethos of being easy on the children prevailed at these marking centres.
If one considers that 30% is often taken as a pass, the picture is even grimmer. Imagine this: Would you go to an accountant, an engineer, a medical doctor or have your child educated by someone who only gets 3 out of 10 right in mathematics? Would you, Minister Pandor?
We pump out desperately undereducated children year in and year out on the basis of an ANC-run national education Ministry. What is to be done? The most fundamental thing we can do is to put properly trained teachers in front of functional classes in functional schools, which is what the DA is doing in the Western Cape. Do I still think that the matric results were a fraud? Yes, I do. [Applause.]
There was no debate