Truth hidden by South Africa’s matric pass rate

While South Africa’s 2024 matrics achieved the highest pass rate since the country became a democracy, the “real” pass rate, which includes how many students drop-out before they can sit for their exams, was still well below 60%.
Basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube announced the official matric pass rate for the Class of 2024 on Monday, 13 January 2024.
An impressive 87.3% of matrics in public schools who wrote their National Senior Certificate exams late last year passed, an improvement of 4.4 percentage points over the previous year.
MyBroadband analysed matric pass rates over the last 15 years for a comprehensive comparison.
Overall, South Africa’s official matric pass rate has improved drastically from the 67.8% achieved by the Class of 2010.
One of the first major achievements was the figure climbing over 80% for the first time in democratic South Africa in 2019.
The Covid-19 pandemic had a substantial impact on the 2020 and 2021 results, however, where the official pass rates slumped to around 74%.
The rate jumped back over 80% in 2022 and 2023 as the schooling environment normalised.
However, certain education institutions and the Democratic Alliance (DA) do not regard the official pass rate to be a good reflection of South Africa’s schooling reality.
The official pass rate only shows the proportion of matrics who passed their final exams relative to the number who actually sat down and wrote them.
Many pupils who were supposed to be part of the cohort taking their final exams had either left the education system completely or been held back at some point.
To account for these learners, Equal Education and the DA calculate the proportion of matrics that had passed the exams relative to the number that had enrolled in Grade 2 and Grade 10, respectively, for a “real” matric pass rate.
Grade 1 is generally not used due to the comparatively higher number of pupils that repeat the year, as the jump can be challenging for those with little or no formal education at the pre-primary level.
The real matric pass rates have improved from just above 30% to 55% from 2010 to 2024.
Only 31.4% of the Grade 2 pupils enrolled in 2001 passed their matric in 2010, compared to 55.9% in 2024.
Where just 34.8% of the Gr. 10s enrolled in 2008 passed their matric in 2010, 55.9% of the Gr. 10 pupils enrolled in 2022 also passed their matric in 2024.
There was an unusual decline in the real matric pass rate from 2021 to 2023, which did not correlate with the official pass rate increase.
When measured using the Gr. 2 cohorts, it dropped from 55.7% to 53.0%. Using the Gr. 10 cohorts, the proportion that passed declined from 53.4% to 51.3%.
2024 is the first year after the pandemic in which the real matric pass rates improved.
While certainly a commendable achievement for the Class of 2024, it should still be great cause for concern that over two in every five pupils enrolled in Grade 2 and Grade 10 do not pass matric.
This could be among the factors contributing to South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis.
45.5% of people aged 15 to 34 years were unemployed in the third quarter of 2024, compared with 32.9% unemployment across all age groups.
The graph below compares South Africa’s official and real matric pass rates over the past 15 years.
