South Africa
Over 900 000 matriculants anxiously awaiting matric results─── 06:52 Mon, 16 Jan 2023
The 2022 Matric results are set to be released this week. Over 900 000 matriculants wrote the exam, a 3% increase over 2021’s participants, comprising full-time and part-time learners from all nine provinces.
A team of 52 811 markers began marking the National Senior Certificate examinations on 10 December 2022 until 6 January 2023.
There were nearly a million matriculants registered for last year's exams.
According to education activist Hendrick Makaneta, despite having spent twelve years from grade one to grade twelve, some of the students were unable to complete their final school year for a variety of reasons.
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"This is a cause for great concern, and there might be some reasons for this that the department has not adequately addressed, such as teenage pregnancy, employment, poverty, and drugs, as well as criminal matters, which are also affecting learners in their terrain of education."
The general secretary of the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (Sadtu), Mugwena Maluleke, is urging parents to support learners as they await the release of the results. He says this may help minimise the level of anxiety.
"Our appeal is that the people of our country rally behind our students and their parents as they will be making choices about their future and give them the support that they require. As the people of this particular country, let us continue to be supportive of our teachers, our students, and our schools in order to improve the quality of our examination outcomes, in particular the matric results."
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The general secretary of the Professional Educators Union, Ben Machipi, says he believes the release of the results a week after school has already begun could be the result of the aftermath of Covid-19. He believes that this is a disadvantage for students who want to register to repeat grade 12.
"I think there are signs that we will gradually revert back to our usual way of releasing the results in the first week of January. "However, the students who discover they would not have passed the matric exams will not have lost much ground in the two weeks that we will have covered."
Umalusi will brief the media and officials from the Department of Basic Education on Monday morning on the pronouncement of both public and private school results before their release on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.
