SAILI Matric Results 2013

Sometimes it is hard to get a real sense of a school or initiative’s actual performance. With the Matric pass requirements so low (30 % for subjects and the license to fail a few too), reporting 100% pass rate is not really that helpful.

More useful is the bachelors pass rate (which is only 100% in the very best schools) which does tend to give a much better perspective. Even these requirements are not that high – in short you need 50% in a four (mostly harder) subjects and not do too badly in the others (1 fail is acceptable).

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Bird’s eye view of the South African schooling system

Ok – so I recently discovered the Department of Basic Education has what is called the Master List of schools available for download on its site.

I have been poking at this and while it has a lot of data, most of it is structural: stating what district, circuit etc a school is in. No performance data here or segmentation of students by grade which would give one a sense of perspective on attrition but, nevertheless it is an interesting data source for looking at the South African schooling system and with the right tools and some time can be a useful supporting resource. Read more