EDITORIAL | South Africa should shift focus from matric rates

If basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube is correct, and the evidence she cites strongly suggests that she is, then South Africa’s education debate has for too long been trapped in a comforting but ultimately dishonest obsession with matric pass rates.

This single headline figure allows politicians to congratulate themselves once a year while ignoring the fragile, underfunded and deeply unequal foundations on which those results rest.

Those foundations determine long before grade 12 whether a child will ever reach a matric classroom at all, let alone pass with mathematics, science or a bachelor’s endorsement.

Gwarube’s call to invert the pyramid and focus national energy on early childhood development and the first years of schooling is not a radical policy shift. It is an overdue acknowledgement of what researchers, teachers and parents have argued for decades.

Fine words and careful diagnoses, however, will mean little unless politicians are willing to do the hardest and least glamorous work of reform.

Children who cannot read for meaning by grade 3 are effectively locked out of the curriculum for the rest of their school careers. Many then drift through the system until they drop out between grades 10 and 12, where the real crisis lies and where the fiction of a rising pass rate collides with the reality of lost learners, particularly boys, who disappear from both statistics and public concern.

Fine words and careful diagnoses, however, will mean little unless politicians are willing to do the hardest and least glamorous work of reform.

This means putting real money, sustained political commitment and administrative competence behind early childhood development, foundation phase teaching, teacher training, infrastructure and school nutrition.

Too often early childhood development is treated as a rhetorical priority while budgets remain thin, responsibilities fragmented and implementation uneven, especially in the poorest quintile one to three schools that already carry the heaviest burden and yet produce most bachelor passes when the system functions as it should.

If ministers truly believe, as Gwarube argues, that matric results are built from the age of two, then cabinet, parliament and provincial governments must align spending, oversight and accountability with that belief.

They must resist the temptation of short-term political wins and commit to the slow, patient work of building school readiness, literacy and numeracy from the earliest years.

Until politicians put their money where their mouths are, South Africa will continue to celebrate record pass rates while quietly accepting that most children never had a fair chance to be counted among them.