Lack of fidelity to basic education targets is at the root of weaknesses seen in the 2024 National Senior Certificate results and will be evident in the quest for access to higher education institutions, which will dominate the concerns of so many families in the weeks ahead.
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The National Planning Commission (NPC) congratulates all learners who passed the 2024 National Senior Certificate. Their success is celebrated.
As we proceed to the registration period for post-school learners, it is appropriate for the NPC to reflect on the state of education and training and to assess progress made towards the achievement of the goals and targets set out in Chapter 9 of the National Development Plan (NDP) Vision 2030 – Our Future Make it Work.
During 2025, the NPC will be inviting all stakeholders to join us in this reflection as we begin the diagnostic process that will lead to the next iteration of the NDP that will take our country beyond 2030.
NDP 2030 prioritised the urgent improvement of education and training as a critical enabler of the goals of eradicating poverty, reducing inequality and growing the economy. The NDP’s 2011 Diagnostic Report identified two key challenges to achieving these goals: the poor quality of education received by the majority of young people, and the sustained level of unemployment.
This is currently exacerbated by an economy that cannot absorb sufficient numbers of school leavers or graduates. In 2022, the NPC’s Ten-Year Review of the NDP indicated the unemployment rate for those aged 15-24 was 64%, and 42% for those aged 25-34 years while the official national rate was 34.5%. Youth unemployment persists as a problem.
The vision of the NDP is that the sub-sectors of the education and training systems: early childhood development, basic education, post-school education and training and the skills system – and the interconnections between these – must build an inclusive society, provide equal opportunities and help all South Africans, particularly those previously disadvantaged by apartheid, to realise their full potential.
The goals set by NDP are that by 2030, South Africans should have access to education and training of the highest quality leading to significantly improved learning outcomes in international standardised tests comparable to countries at a similar level of development and levels of access, and that graduates of universities and colleges should have the skills and knowledge to meet the present and future needs of the economy and society.
These inspiring goals will only be achieved when implementation is based on plans that are aligned with fiscal policy, coordinated across spheres of government, which have clear indicators to measure progress against agreed targets in time frames that allow for timeous corrective action, and where progress is publicly reported.
The NPC’s Ten-Year Review of the NDP identified poor planning as central to weaknesses in achieving the goals of the NDP.
The national planning system is disjointed, poorly implemented, and misaligned to the strategic goals of the NDP. It is inadequately aligned across spheres of government, and is poorly funded, sequenced, and co-ordinated. The NPC’s 2024 advisory note on Basic Education drew attention to weaknesses in education planning including a failure to include NDP and Medium-Term Strategic Framework indicators in Annual Performance Plans.
The planning capacity to diagnose problems, design solutions, resource plans and manage change at an operational level is weak across the system.
The NDP provides targets for each goal. Lack of fidelity to these targets and their indicators is at the root of weaknesses seen in the 2024 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results and will be evident in the quest for access to higher education institutions (HEI), which will dominate the concerns of so many families in the weeks ahead.
Attention to prioritisation in a resource constrained environment, planning, and resource allocation must be urgently addressed in both government departments.
There are several goals and targets in which we are seriously underperforming with significant consequences for our development trajectory. While the NDP targets will need to be reviewed for the post-2030 NDP, the diagnostics that inform these targets must include a review of planning and implementation failures.
Where targets are not realistic, consideration must be given to formulating new goals and targets that are evidence-based, which prioritise actions that are strategic given the fiscally constrained environment.
The NDP targets for improving the literacy, mathematics and science outcomes in basic education include the goal that by 2030, 90% of learners should perform above 50% in grades 3, 6 and 9.
How are we doing?
The country has not had a national instrument to measure and report on progress in grades 3, 6 and 9 in literacy and maths since 2015. The results of the Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) new 2024 South African Systemic Evaluation Study (SASE) were released in 2025 and provide a baseline for monitoring progress in the future.
However, the baselines for these grades are disappointing. For example, the performance of as many as 80% of learners in Grade 3, and 67% in Grade 6 is described as only “emerging” or “evolving” (rather than “enhancing” or “extending”) in literacy. This means that reading performance in the first language has not been consolidated by the end of Grade 3, with the majority of learners transitioning to a second language in Grade 4.
The maths performance is worse. The SASE baseline was conducted in 2022. If the next assessment takes place in 2025, the results will only be available by 2026, and any improvement will be based on activities presumably already undertaken. In addition, this is the first time we will be able to assess progress against a baseline.
These time frames are inadequate to guide planning. In addition to the nationally standardised SASE, we need more immediately available and credible data to assess progress and inform targets nationally and provincially before the next NDP. The DBE’s work on oral reading fluency may be useful for this purpose and to guide school and district literacy planning. A rapid assessment, which can similarly be used at school and district level and aggregated provincially for numeracy, should be instituted.
The DBE aimed to improve performance in two international comparative studies. For the Southern and East African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SEAMEQ) study, the DBE goal was to improve performance in Grade 6 languages and maths from 495 to 600 points by 2022.
How are we doing?
SEACMEQ 5 was administered in 2021, and the DBE announced the results in December 2024. The literacy score for Grade 6 was 505, while a decline from the improvement of 495 of SEACMEQ 2 of 2011, was still well below the DBE and NDP target for 2022. The mathematics score for Grade 6 was 525, an improvement from the 486 of SEACMEQ 2. SEACMEQ continues to provide evidence of significant disparities in resourcing (including textbooks and infrastructure) across schools, with significant inadequacies in rural and poorly resourced areas.
For the international Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the DBE aimed to improve South Africa’s average Grade 9 scores in mathematics from 264 to 420 points by 2023. The NDP proposes that by 2030 the TIMSS scores for Grade 9 should reach 500 points.
How are we doing?
TIMSS figures for 2011, 2015, 2019 and 2023 for Grade 9 show consistent improvement in maths, but a 2023 score of only 397 – well below the DBE target. Again, there is a strong correlation between performance and quintile and socioeconomic background of learners. In addition, students speaking the language of the test at home, and learners in well-resourced schools, performed better. Of concern is a decline in performance at Grade 5 level between 2015 and 2019 in both maths and science.
This is convincing evidence that improvement in performance in the entire education and training system is urgent and must begin from the early years. The NPC’s advisory note, NDP Implementation Priorities for the 2024-2029 Medium-Term Development Plan (MTDP) proposed that there be a focus on improving literacy and numeracy by planning for the prerequisite actions to create the conditions to achieve this.
Improving literacy and numeracy from the foundation years would significantly accelerate progress by addressing the systemic inefficiencies that result in failure and repetition and the multiple long-term personal and systemic consequences of poor foundations on subsequent performance and retention.
Evidence-informed planning aligned with resourcing across clear timeframes is needed nationally and provincially including monitoring and reporting on both implementation and progress against agreed indicators and informing timeous corrective action.
The NDP target of 300,000 learners being eligible for a bachelor’s programme, with 350,000 learners passing mathematics and 320,000 passing science were drawn from the DBE plans to increase to this level by 2024.
How are we doing?
In the 2024 NSC, 173,774 candidates passed maths, and only 151,839 passed science. Both are less than half of the target for 2030. While 337,158 candidates achieved a bachelor’s pass which indicates a strong likelihood of achieving the NDP target by 2030, this is one of the areas that highlights the system interdependency of DBE and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).
For example, an increase in the pool of young people eligible to proceed to register for a bachelor’s degree but without passes in maths and science has important implications for DHET. DHET provides a planning framework for each institution, which sets targets for student enrolment. These targets drive institutional funding, and HEIs must operate within these targets. The DHET has indicated that insufficient NSC maths and science graduates and the under-preparedness of these students have had a direct impact on both DHET’s under-enrolment in engineering and science, and in its failure to meet the NDP output targets in these fields.
Minister Gwarube is applauded for acknowledging deficiencies in the foundational years of learning – understood as comprising of the first 1,000 days from conception, the second 1,000 days (with the important role of community-based Early Childhood Education centres), and the first four years of compulsory education (Grade R to Grade 3). The NPC supports the Minister’s commitment to embark on an urgent strategic reorientation of the system towards strengthening foundational learning. Without this, the NDP targets for NSC outputs cannot be achieved.
However, the NPC remains concerned that the strategy for the developmentally crucial “first 1,000 days” from conception does not yet have effective interdepartmental coordination between education, health and social development. Mechanisms for achieving this are outlined in the 2024 NPC advisory note, Effective Cross Departmental and inter-Governmental in Early Childhood Development.
As the Minister has indicated, a strategic reorientation towards improving the quality of the learning outcomes in the first four years of compulsory education must be a priority. The NPC adopted a stakeholder-informed process to review Chapter 9 of the NDP.
This included consultation with the departments of education at national and provincial level. The aim was to identify priority areas which, if attended to in the remaining five years of the NDP implementation period, could accelerate implementation of the overall goals of the NDP, maximise system efficiency in a resource constrained environment, and improve quality in order to improve efficiency and address pervasive inequality.
This informed the NPC’s 2024 advisory note: Basic Education Priorities for the MTDP, 2024-29: Improving Planning To Improve Literacy And Numeracy. The key challenges identified included:
- The absence of indicators to monitor progress. Without this planning is adrift.
- Resource inequities within and across provinces are a significant driver of unequal outcomes. The absence of the key conditions necessary for effective teaching and learning of literacy and mathematics correlates with both the socioeconomic status of the school and the learner. Resourcing inequities drive the unequal conditions of teaching and learning where unequal outcomes are the inevitable consequence
- Poor support to educators is a major constraint to improving learning outcomes. In addition to the severe material resource constraints under which many teachers work, the system to support teachers is weak. Curriculum advisers operate in crippling low ratios to schools. These are significantly below the recommendations of gazetted DBE policy. This absence of support contributes to massive internal inefficiencies, particularly because so many goals and plans assume a capacity that does not exist and are thus fatally flawed from conception.
- Non-compliance with national norms and standards for school funding. Several provinces are not compliant with The National Norms and Standards for School Funding, which provide School Governing Bodies in no-fee schools with the resources to purchase, inter alia, learning and teaching support material and to maintain the infrastructure of the school.
- Non-compliance with constitutional funding obligations. Our Constitution made the right to basic education (grades R to 9) immediately realisable. Provinces are obliged to prioritise constitutional obligations as these take precedence over other allocation pressures
- Planning systems are poor. This is at the heart of all the challenges identified. More rigorous planning for, and monitoring of, actions to improve literacy and mathematics is a necessary prerequisite to achieving the goals of the NDP.
The NDP has made clear recommendations for action to address each of these challenges. These could usefully inform the Minister’s “strategic reorientation” towards improving the quality of the learning outcomes in the first four years of compulsory education.
While government bears the primary responsibility for driving the planning that will drive this strategic reorientation, the NDP is a plan for the whole of society, and this strategic reorientation will require partnerships with civil society, and key stakeholders in education – particularly the organised teaching profession in order to achieve the goals of the NDP, and to collaboratively diagnose obstacles to achieving these goals. DM
Professor Mary Metcalfe is a commissioner of the National Planning Commission.