South African school pass rate improves for fourth straight year

South Africa’s school pass rate rose for a fourth consecutive year to the highest since the end of apartheid.

Of the 790 405 learners who sat for the exams late in 2019, 81.3% passed, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said Tuesday at an event in Midrand, north of Johannesburg. That compares with a rate of 78.2% in the previous year.

While the figure has increased significantly over the past 10 years, the quality of South Africa’s education system continues to lag. It was placed 114th out of 137 countries by the World Economic Forum in 2017, the last time the organisation published a ranking for the quality of schooling in its Global Competitiveness Index. That’s behind the Democratic Republic of Congo, Georgia and Turkey.

South Africa spends about 14% of its budget on primary and secondary education, more than on any other expenditure item, but the poor quality continues to constrain an economy in which almost 30% of the labour force is unemployed.

The country’s basic education system has poorer outcomes than that of its peers that spend less on schooling on a per capita basis, according to the International Monetary Fund. The system is led back by a lack of knowledge among educators and uneven availability of textbooks, while unions “fervently resist any policy to monitor teachers by blocking accountability reforms,” the lender said in a report last year.

The jobless rate for those that have passed final-year exams, known locally as matric, is 29.8% compared with 34.4% for those without the qualification, data from Statistics South Africa show.

The pass rate for the 12 595 private school learners who wrote exams set by the Independent Examinations Board is 98.8% compared with 98.9% in 2018.

© 2020 Bloomberg L.P.