On her visit to Noordwyk Secondary School recently, Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga revealed that this year South Africa has recorded the highest number of candidates ever enrolled for the National Senior Certificate examinations since the dawn of democracy.
The minister spoke at the school while conducting the visit with Gauteng Premier David Makhura, Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi, and City of Johannesburg MMC for Corporate and Shared Services in the City of Johannesburg Loyiso Masuku, to check the state of readiness of the matrics for their final exams.
She said this year the department had recorded 897 786 candidates, comprising 735 677 full-time and 162 109 part-time learners. Gauteng had 175 000 candidates enrolled for the exams.
“The learners are assuring us that we are ready to go [start the exams]. This is a class that had the most difficult time. The Grade 11s of last year only came back to school in July. Even when they came, they came with a differentiated timetable, sometimes they had alternative days or weeks,” she added.
Motshekga explained that the learners could only cover about 60% of their curriculum last year, and were forced to carry over some of the Grade 11 work to Grade 12 because the paper they were writing was set in 2019 and no changes could be made.
Speaking on how he felt about the Free State having the highest matric pass rate last year, Lesufi said having almost 175 000 candidates in Gauteng was a challenge.
He added that normally the higher the numbers were in Gauteng, the lower the percentage pass would be, stating that Free State had less than 40 000 matriculants.
“We are almost three times more than that. It has gone beyond competition, it is now about consolidation of quality and giving our children a lifetime opportunity to be better off,” said Lesufi.
