Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee, Professor Mayatula

Honourable members

On 30^th December last year, I announced the Senior Certificate results for 2003. The announcement took place at a very special moment in the history of our country, on the eve of our ten years of freedom.

In just under ten years, we have transformed the education system from being a cause of despair to be a repository of hope for the millions of students and thousands of teachers who are involved in the system.

In this regard, we dismantled the racially and ethnically segregated education departments and created a new single education and training system; developed new curricula to suit the needs of a post-apartheid society in the twenty-first century; enhanced the quality of learning and teaching; improved the qualifications of thousands of unqualified and under-qualified teachers; entrenched the values of our Constitution through the Values in Education programme; developed a framework for improving access to basic quality education for the poor; eliminated the phenomenon of children learning under trees; introduced democratic participation in school governance; restructured the further education and training college sector in order to accelerate the development of medium- and high-level skills; provided loans and scholarships for poor students to enter higher education; and reconfigured higher education institutions and programmes.

These are remarkable achievements, which are an illustration of the determination of the Government to expand access to quality education and training to all our people.

With specific reference to the Senior Certificate, my Department has led the introduction of special interventions to improve teaching and learning, and as a result, improve the pass rate. The creation of 102 special Mathematics and Science schools is one such intervention. The introduction of winter schools and Saturday classes is yet another intervention. We also introduced preparatory examinations to give students a good sense of what is expected of them in the Senior Certificate examination.

Alongside the special interventions, we also improved the conduct of the Senior Certificate examinations. We now have an assessment and examination system that we can be proud of. Both internal and external reports have emphatically concluded that the administration of the 2003 Senior Certificate Examination was beyond reproach.

This is reflected in a 74-page report, which I received from Umalusi on 22 December 2003. May I remind honourable members that Umalusi is an independent body charged with the legal responsibility of assuring the integrity and quality of the entire Senior Certificate examination process. Umalusi is not a part of the Department of Education. It is made up of independent experts from various organisations and institutions. Anyone who knows the organisational structure and the personalities involved in Umalusi would know that it is literally impossible to influence it in any way, contrary to what some ill-informed critics and those who are uncomfortable with the truth were saying during the silly season.

Umalusi certified the results and was satisfied that the standard of the question papers was appropriate and fair; the conduct of the examinations was proper, regular and incident free; the standard of marking and internal moderation was good; the standardisation process was sufficiently rigorous; and the conduct of continuous assessment was acceptable.

The fact that our Senior Certificate assessment system is running so well is no minor achievement, given the scale of the operation. Twenty-two question papers were written in the six national subjects - Mathematics, Physical Science, English Second Language, Accounting, Biology and History. These are the gateway subjects with the largest enrolment.

In all, 1456 question papers (including the 22 national papers) were written, 1056 examiners and 554 internal moderators were appointed countrywide, 5 703 examination centres were used, 25 054 markers and 77 marking centres were established.

The magnitude of the Senior Certificate examination is also reflected by the 440 267 full time candidates who wrote the 2003 examination (457 147 registered) and 205 195 part time candidates who registered for the examination.

The successful running of the 2003 examination is the culmination of more than 18 months of planning in which the Department of Education convened monthly inter-provincial examination meetings with all heads of provincial examination bodies to ensure efficient and credible implementation of the Code of Conduct for the Senior Certificate examination and to continuously strengthen the national examination and assessment system.

For its part, Umalusi reported to me that they undertook five activities to monitor the quality of the Senior Certificate examination. These are:

• the moderation of question papers;
• the monitoring of the conduct of the examinations;
• the moderation and monitoring of the marking;
• the standardisation of the results; and
• the moderation of school based assessment (CASS).

Umalusi moderated 2 245 question papers for the 2003 Senior Certificate examination. Sixty-nine (69) external moderators carried out the moderation of the question papers. The moderators, I am told, assessed the standard of the question paper, the coverage of the syllabus, the presentation of the question paper, the clarity of the instructions to students, language usage, and the time allocated for the writing of the paper.

UMALUSI noted the absence of serious irregularities as evidence of the improvement in the administration of the examination. The most significant achievement has been the tightened security systems in all provinces and the overall improvement of the examination processes and systems at school, district and provincial head office level.

The greatest lie that was told by some of the self-appointed experts was that the marks were systematically increased to boost the pass rate. Nothing can be further from the truth. The picture painted by Umalusi puts paid to this lie.

Umalusi reported to me, and they repeated it at the press conference they held on 6^th January, that the students' raw marks in the 2003 examination were in most cases close to the accepted norm for each of the papers. In this regard, during the standardisation process, 240 decisions were made to accept the students' raw marks. Twenty-eight (28) decisions were in favour of adjusting the marks downwards, and only thirteen (13) decisions were made to adjust the marks upwards.

What was very disturbing to me about the comments made on the Senior Certificate was the attack on the integrity of Umalusi. I said to you earlier that Umalusi is an independent organisation meant to assure the quality of the examination. It is crucial for our democracy that we should respect the independent statutory bodies we set up to monitor what we do. We should not only show respect to these bodies only when they say what we would like them to say, and discredit them when they say something we do not like.

Finally, I wish to take this opportunity to once again congratulate the matric class of 2003, their teachers and their parents for the outstanding performance in the Senior Certificate examination. I also thank the Portfolio Committee for giving me an opportunity to address you on this matter.

I thank you.