This report, produced for the Department of Basic Education, contains background analysis that fed into the Department’s 2024 sector review. It benefitted from inputs from various analysts at RESEP, and underpinned a presentation made by the author at RESEP’s 2024 Quantitative Education Research (QER) workshop.
It examines in depth one important topic in the schooling sector, namely mathematics outcomes from the secondary school level. Much of the focus is on the number of Grade 12 learners obtaining a mark of at least 60% in the year-end examinations, a high-priority indicator in the government’s five-year plans. It is argued that targets should ideally be higher, both because TIMSS trends point to this being possible, and because a comparison of the supply from schools and university demand in the form of minimum admissions criteria points to supply being too low. In establishing the university demand, mathematics admissions criteria collected from a representative sample of universities, weighted by first-year student numbers, are used.
Analysis from the report was presented at the 2024 Basic Education Lekgotla – see the YouTube video here.
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