Josephine Mokhoatlheng, deputy principal of Eastbank High School, said it was essential to strengthen the quality of learning from Grade 8 to 11 in the school to guarantee a steady quality of matric passes and a long-term culture of good performance.
“This will help us to achieve the desired 100 percent as it will enable us to detect and attend to challenges at the foundation level to improve on weak students and those with the potential to get even better results,” she said.
The school, which participated in the Secondary School Improvement Programme (SSIP) initiated by the Gauteng Department of Education to improve the matric pass rate, achieved a 7.7 percent improvement on its 2014 record to 76.47 percent.
Mokhoatlheng said the improved pass rate indicated the possibility for further improvement towards the provincial target of 80 percent. She also attributed the failure to achieve this target to many pupils who failed pure maths, a subject dreaded by many.
“We need to strengthen our support strategy for this subject and also the sciences, strengthen attendance in SSIP, check on syllabus coverage, identify and support weak and progressed learners whose numbers will increase in 2016, stop late coming to class, and strengthen parental participation in home study. Alternatively, [we need to] keep the students at school for longer in the afternoon for their studies.”
Mokhoatlheng also identified the language competency of children transferring from former Model C schools as a challenge. “Most of them have not attended the vernacular language [classes] in the lower grades and fail as they will have very little time to learn the concepts before the exams,” she concluded.
