Johannesburg - High schools operate at an efficiency rate of only 49% and at this rate 10 pupil years at high school are required for every pass, a new report by Stellenbosch University found.
South African high schools take an average of 10 years to produce one matriculant, according to a new report by SU’s Research on Socio-economic Policy (RESEP) group.
The report presented a picture of pupil performance and flows through the school system and was compiled by Professor Servaas van der Berg, Dr Chris van Wyk, Rebecca Selkirk, and Dr Heleen Hofmeyr.
“We found that our high schools operate at an efficiency rate of only 49%, if measured in terms of the years of enrolment in secondary school for every matric pass. In other words, at this rate, 10 learner years at high school are required for every pass,” Van der Berg said,
He added that this is because pupils who eventually matriculate only do so after having repeated a year once or more, but mainly because even more students spend some years in high school without ever reaching or passing matric.
The report found that grade repetition was extremely common across all school phases but it became especially pronounced in high school. According to the report, grades 4 and 10 experience notably larger “bulges” in enrolments, an indication of repetition because these grades represent the beginning of new school phases.
Van der Berg pointed out that the strongest bottleneck effect was found in the Further Education and Training (FET) phase from Grades 10 to 12.
“Learners seem to get ‘stuck’ in Grade 10 for two or more years, after which many drop out, with only a fraction of learners managing to make it through to Grade 12. Furthermore, most learners will repeat at least one grade in their school career, and around one in three will repeat more than once,” he said.
Van der Berg said a major problem with repetition is that there are pupils sitting in grades for which they are above the grade-appropriate age and that the majority of these pupils do not acquire the knowledge and skills required to progress through the system on time.
“We found that repetition is far more common in poorer schools: In no-fee (quintile 1-3) schools, 60 to 65% of Grade 10 learners were overage in 2019. In the wealthiest (quintile 5) schools, this figure was substantially lower—but still quite high—with up to 30% of learners in Grade 10 considered overage,” he said.
The educational economist added that their report shows how well timely and accurate administrative data can predict future performance and learner flows. He said that such analyses can be used at multiple levels to inform policy and practice to curb waste.
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The Star