But there are unexpected pockets that do better than expected, said education economist Dr Martin Gustafsson in a webinar hosted by The Outlier this week.
South Africa’s biggest schooling bottleneck isn’t the matric pass rate, it’s the small pipeline of learners leaving school with strong enough maths to enter university programmes.
There’s a myth that because the number of learners achieving bachelor-level passes has been increasing that the schooling system is producing more students than are needed, he said.
But his analysis of the data suggests the schooling system is under-producing maths-ready students by about 10% relative to what universities actually require, forcing institutions to admit students who don’t meet their own minimum maths thresholds. That is not a good thing for the whole tertiary education system, he said.
“About two thirds of first-year university students are studying something where they had to have some minimum mark in mathematics — maybe 40%, 50%, 60%, sometimes even 70%. So they’ve been subject to some mathematics admissions criteria.”
We need to do some catching up in the area of mathematics, he said.
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South Africa’s surprising maths bright spots
Gustaffson has also looked into racial inequalities in mathematics. The proportion of learners who get 60% is very low across the country, he said. But there are unexpected pockets of the system that do better than expected.
“It turns out the best part of the country to be in, if you are Black and you want to get ahead in mathematics, is Limpopo, a relatively poor province. Second is Mpumalanga.”
The finding flips a common assumption that urban provinces, like Gauteng and the Western Cape, should do better, given their greater resources and ability to attract experienced teachers.
Why Limpopo? Gustafsson pointed to a longstanding maths teaching tradition and a controversial practice that may be doing more good than policymakers admit: high grade repetition.
In Limpopo close to 40% of Grade 10 learners repeat, far above the national average, a statistic often framed as inefficiency. On this Gustafsson urged caution: if repetition is helping produce stronger maths outcomes, then cracking down on it could kill a “goose that’s laying a relatively good egg”.
There is a myth that increasing the number of learners who take maths at school will solve the problem of there not being enough young people who can enter mathematically oriented programmes at university, said Gustafsson.
We need fewer, he said. With roughly half of maths learners failing at the 30% level, increasing the number taking maths can depress overall performance. Instead, he said, provinces that quietly tighten entry into maths classes, such as Gauteng, can end up producing more high-level achievers, while provinces that keep the doors wide open may see the opposite.
Another myth is that the schooling system is on the decline, which Gustafsson calls the “sinking Titanic” story. The data show we are improving.
He cites a 2024 McKinsey international education report that said if there are three developing countries in the world that, according to the data, are on their way up, it’s South Africa, Morocco, Peru.
That’s not to say that things aren’t bad. ”They’re bad and they’ve been improving,” he said.
“People find that difficult to grasp.”
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