By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube declared readiness to administer the 2024 NSC Examinations which begin in earnest on Monday 21 October 2024.
With an excess of 727 000 full time and 155 215 Part Time candidates prepared to sit for examinations, the Minister addressed members of the media to unpack the details of the 2024 NSC exams.
Gwarube described this year’s final exams as representing “the cumulative efforts of our education system, our schools, communities” and her department.
“With just hours to go before the first paper is written, I proudly announce that we are ready to administer the 2024 NSC exams — holding ourselves to best-in-class integrity, security and efficiency standards,” she said.
Gwarube said this year’s crop of matriculants began high school at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, with that disruption having had a lasting impact on their learning. This, she said, had been addressed through several interventions such as the Learning Recovery Programme, personalised learning interventions, additional teaching support and socio-emotional care.
Other preparation initiatives rolled out in provinces across the country included face-to-face extra tuition sessions, Saturday catch-up programmes and extended school hours in key subjects such as mathematics, life sciences and business studies.
There was also additional support in the form of revision materials, past question papers and online resources made available through public-private partnerships with stakeholders like Vodacom, MTN, the National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT) and other corporate partners.
She also made a plea to those in parliament, legislatures, and councils that oversight visits be minimised during this time.
“This is a big moment for our matriculants. We want to make sure they write in peace.”
For their part, Gwarube said learners should minimise distractions.
“Please stay off Instagram, Facebook and TikTok during these critical times,” Gwarube said.
The department has said that it has been reassured by power utility Eskom and municipalities that load reduction will be suspended during the week of matric exams where pupils will write computer-based subjects.
“There was a meeting between the department and Eskom. Now we have the challenge of load reduction, not load shedding. Eskom said there will be no load shedding, as there is no load shedding [in the country at the moment].
“The subjects that require electricity will be written this week and they have promised us that there will be no disturbances whatsoever.
“But we encourage provinces to enter into discussions with municipalities because municipalities are the ones who are now embarking on this load reduction.
The municipalities and the South African Local Government Association (Salga) promised that exams would run, even though we know there are those people who will want to switch off schools because of exams,” deputy minister Makgabo Reginah Mhaule said.
Meanwhile President Cyril Ramaphosa took a moment on Sunday to give the pupils one last pep-talk before their final push.
I’d like to wish all the matriculants in our country, who start their examinations on Monday, a great deal of luck,” he stated.
“Matric is quite a challenging exam, but I know that our matriculants are up to it. You’ve all been working very hard on preparing for these exams, so I wish you the best of luck.”
The 2024 cohort will be aiming to improve on 2023’s 82.9%, which was up from 80.1% in 2022.