Durban - "The best advice I can give you is to focus all your energies on the exams and I know that you will do well and make us proud,” said Education MEC Mthandeni Dlungwana to the matric class of 2018 on Tuesday.
The National Senior Certificate exams continued on a high note when the largest number of candidates wrote English Paper 1.
Dlungwana was addressing Grade 12 pupils at Vukuzakhe High School in uMlazi. He had visited a few schools in uMlazithe area this morning to monitor whether today’s paper got off to a smooth start.
The largest number of matric candidates, 279 pupils from four schools in Engonyameni, outside uMlazi, were also accommodated at Vukuzakhe due to fears of disruptions. There have been service delivery protests in Engonyameni in the past few weeks.
Exam papers were delivered to the school on time and pupils began writing the two-hour paper at 9am as scheduled.
Vukuzakhe High School achieved a 79% pass rate last year and was one of the schools that had performed well in the province.
A total of 152 747 full-time and 34 980 part-time candidates are sitting for the matric exams this year.
Dlungwana said he was optimistic that the province would achieve the goal of an 80% pass rate.
“We are going to make the country proud because when KwaZulu-Natal performs badly, it affects the national results. We have to make sure that we meet our targets,” said Dlungwana.
He said the biggest goal for the province was to eliminate the schools that had a zero percent pass rate.
“Last year, we had three schools with a zero percent pass rate. This year, we worked tirelessly to ensure that we decrease the number of schools which performed below 60%,” the MEC said.
He said although there was some instability and incidents of community faction fights over the year, the department had done everything to ensure that schools were not affected.
The department said no glitches were reported at matric exam centres.