Why South Africa’s Pass Rates Don’t Tell the Whole Truth
Dr Mamokgethi Phakeng and Nkepile Mabuse unpack the accountability gap, the incentives behind maths outcomes, and how language shame quietly damages learning long before matric.
South Africa’s education debates often arrive late, loud, and predictable. When matric results land, the country oscillates between celebration and outrage. Pass rates rise, we applaud. Pass rates drop, we panic. But in the middle of this annual ritual sits a harder truth: the way we talk about performance often focuses on the nearest person we can blame, not the system that produced the outcome.
In a candid conversation on CheckPoint: The Podcast, Nkepile Mabuse and Dr Mamokgethi Phakeng cut through the comfort of headline statistics and ask a simpler, more uncomfortable question: when the system fails children, who actually carries the consequences?
The accountability gap nobody wants to name
One of the sharpest observations in this episode is the way accountability behaves like gravity: it pulls down. When learners fail, the failure becomes personal. When schools underperform, scrutiny intensifies at the ground level. Teachers take the beating. Learners absorb the shame. Communities internalise the disappointment.
Yet when failure is caused by structural issues, chronic underinvestment, policy choices, and long-term neglect, accountability tends to evaporate. No one “takes a beating” for the failure to invest. The system can underdeliver for years, then act surprised when the outcomes reflect that reality.
This is not an argument against individual responsibility. It is an argument against selective responsibility. A system that is serious about outcomes must be equally serious about the conditions required to produce them. Otherwise, we build a culture where failure is personalised at the bottom and excused at the top.
When numbers become performance, not proof
South Africa is not short on education data. We have metrics, targets, comparisons, and public reporting. But data is only as honest as the incentives that shape it.
Dr Phakeng highlights how the structure of measurement can quietly influence behaviour inside schools. When success is defined narrowly and rewarded publicly, schools adapt to protect their reputations. That adaptation is not always malicious. Often it is survival: a way to avoid being labelled as failing, a way to keep confidence intact, a way to stay off the national chopping block.
But when measurement becomes a performance, it stops being proof.
This is where the conversation turns to one of the most contested fault lines in South African schooling: maths outcomes.
The incentives behind maths, pass rates, and “improvement”
In the episode, Dr Phakeng unpacks a dynamic that many people sense but struggle to describe: the incentives that can encourage schools to move learners away from pure maths and into maths literacy.
The logic is simple. If a school is rewarded for averages, distinctions, and pass rates, then the school is incentivised to protect those numbers. Moving learners to maths literacy can lift the overall average and reduce the risk of failure. On paper, results look better. In reality, the long-term cost is enormous: weaker quantitative capability across the system, and a narrower pathway into maths-dependent fields.
This creates a national illusion: improved outcomes that do not necessarily reflect improved learning.
The deeper issue is not whether maths literacy has value. The issue is what happens when the system quietly relies on it as a reputational shield. If we genuinely want a society that is quantitatively literate, then we need measurement that reflects that ambition, not measurement that can be “managed” through subject shifting.
The quiet violence of language shame
Not all harm in education looks dramatic. Some of it is quiet, repeated, normalised. And few things are as quietly destructive as the moment a child learns to associate confusion with humiliation.
Dr Phakeng points to the way language can become a trap in the classroom. When learners struggle to understand English, the struggle often gets framed as stupidity rather than as a predictable barrier to comprehension. The classroom becomes awkward. The learner becomes embarrassed. The learner goes silent. And over time, silence becomes disengagement.
This is not a side issue. It is foundational.
Learning requires safety: the safety to ask, to misunderstand, to try again. When the learning environment makes language struggle feel like a personal defect, it kills that safety. And once confidence is gone, performance follows it.
A practical solution: normalising multilingual learning
In a country with multiple home languages, “one-language schooling” often feels less like a neutral policy and more like an inherited habit. The episode pushes toward something more practical: normalising multilingual learning as a standard approach, not an exception, not a remedial tactic, and not a political talking point.
The argument is not abstract. It is operational.
If multilingualism is built into resources, it becomes ordinary. If bilingual textbooks exist as a standard, comprehension is supported without drama. If a teacher can switch languages as needed without it being framed as a weakness, learners do not have to pay an emotional tax for understanding.
This is how dignity enters the classroom: not through slogans, but through systems designed for real learners in real contexts.
What this conversation demands
This episode does not aim to comfort. It aims to correct the story we keep telling ourselves.
It challenges the country to stop treating results as a yearly shock and start treating them as an honest reflection of long-term choices. It calls out accountability that only targets the powerless. It exposes incentives that reward optics over outcomes. And it reframes language not as a political inconvenience, but as a learning tool that can either protect or punish.
The question left hanging is the one we should be asking more often: are we measuring learning, or are we measuring the system’s ability to look successful?
Because if we keep rewarding appearances, we will keep buying the same illusion.
Catch up on all CheckPoint Podcast episodes here: https://enca.prod.acquia-sites.com/checkpoint-podcast-0