Schools should be banned from bragging about matric pass rates

Statistics are only useful if they actually give us information we can use and a matric pass rate is hardly useful.

Yes, it’s lovely for the school marketing department but the schools that achieve 100% pass rates typically don’t have a shortage of parents battling to get their kids on the waiting list.

You know who it’s not nice for? Teachers! Go to any school that has boasted a long history of 100% pass rate and ask the teachers about the pressure associated with maintaining that statistic. Most of them will tell you horror stories about extra classes, spoon feeding and pressure from school leadership to not be the teacher who “drops the ball”.

Department of Basic Education director-general, Mathanzima Mweli identified that schools even commit the act of “gatekeeping” which is to hold kids back in lower grades. Some may even push them out of the school so they don’t risk the pass rate.

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As if the pass rate is the important thing. Yes, extra classes are worthy and of course, support for weaker students is important. If, however, you need to implement these interventions in matric or are doing them to protect a statistic then there should be serious concern over our philosophy in education.

Yet schools, and good ones at that, seem to have an unquantifiable lust for a three-figure pass rate and to splash it all over as if it means something.

Why? Who actually benefits? Moreover, who cares? Has there ever been a parent in history that made the decision to send their kid to a school based on its pass rate and, if so, is the expectation that their kid will simply not fail just because they’re at that school? If that’s the case, then you probably wouldn’t want that parent’s kids at your school anyway.

Obviously, no parent would want to chuck their kid into a school with a 0% pass rate but you wouldn’t need to know the school’s pass rate to gauge whether it’s a good school or not… or whether it’s a good fit for your child. That’s just a lazy statistic and one that assumes the impossibility of your kid being the one to stuff up the consistent statistic. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?

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There are plenty of other things that tell a better story about a school, from the facilities to the leadership to the alumni. Any parent who is actually invested in their kid’s future would be better off assessing the school for their kid and not as a general good/bad school. So, while the school’s pass rate may seem like a decent and objective measure of whether it’s a “good school”, it’s certainly no indication of whether your child will thrive there.

If anything, it may be an indication that your studious child may lose teaching time because Sam at the back of the class didn’t do their homework and teacher is more concerned about Sam blemishing their pass record rather than actually teaching the class.

No child left behind and all that may seem cool and it’s not like Sam shouldn’t get attention. Sam threatening the pass rate of the school just shouldn’t be the reason why Sam gets that support.

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So what good is the pass rate? And frankly, with hundreds of schools achieving the 100% pass rate, it’s like bragging about driving a C-Class, 3 Series or A4. Sure, it’s nice but it’s not like it distinguishes you among the top schools. I’d even argue it’s not a consideration to being labelled a “top school”.

So, let’s just do this one thing for our teachers. We stopped printing results in the papers to protect pupils’ privacy. This is one of the lowest hanging fruit we can give our teachers. It’s not like we pay them well enough to deal with this pressure anyway. So, let’s take some of the pressure off.

Let’s stop schools from bragging about their pass rates because that information isn’t useful to anybody and should be far from the motivating force behind our education.