Schooling and learning? How South African students get through high school despite low academic outcomes in the early grades

This paper addresses the following research question: How is it that larger-than-expected proportions of students in the system successfully complete schooling despite the majority of learners not being on a successful learning track in the earlier grades? We aim to describe how South African learners move through the school system at high school, what facilitates these flows, how teachers understand the dynamics of learner progress through the grades, and the implications for how we think about South Africa’s promotion, retention, and assessment systems. We describe nine factors that facilitate learner flows to Grade 12, despite early indications that most Grade 4 learners are not performing at grade level. The paper draws on interviews with 50 high school teachers, existing quantitative databases, official reports and policy documents in the context of two central tensions within the system: firstly, between very high participation rates and quality provision, and secondly, between social promotion and grade repetition. We discuss the implications of how these tensions play out at the school level, especially as they relate to the curriculum, assessment and promotion system, accountability for learning, and remediation across levels in the system. We argue, first, that the system has both retention and social promotion policies, but that this hybrid system is not well understood; and second, that these policies are not accompanied by clear remediation strategies, particularly in Grades 8 and 9, where they are essential.