Parliament to vote on scrapping 30% school pass mark

Today, parliament will vote on whether or not to keep South Africa’s 30% pass mark in place, or raise the pass mark to 50%.

The motion to end the 30% pass mark was tabled by Build One South Africa (BOSA) Leader Mmusi Maimane. The vote follows a parliamentary debate on 28 November, where members were sharply divided on the issue. 

“BOSA has long called for the current 30% pass mark for matric subjects to be scrapped and replaced with a minimum standard of 50%,” said Maimane.

“A 30% pass mark not only diminishes the intellectual potential of South Africa’s youth, but also entrenches mediocrity with low expectations.”

Maimane said that today’s vote is a test of who truly cares about the future of South Africa’s children, and who wants young people to continue scraping by at 30%. 

In order for the motion to pass, the majority of members must be present in parliament, and a simple majority must vote in favour of the motion. 

This, however, appears unlikely, as the two biggest parties in parliament, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the African National Congress (ANC), both argued against the motion at the last debate.

“The ANC and the DA argued that we can’t change the pass mark because government is struggling to improve the education system,” Maimane said. 

“This is a cop-out by the ANC/DA national government coalition and comes as no surprise,” he added. 

‘There’s no such thing as a 30% overall pass mark’ – Minister

The BOSA leader argues that keeping the low pass mark serves the government well, as it hides shortcomings and gives the illusion of success, masking systemic failure in the education system.

However, in the Parliamentary debate, the main argument put forward by the ANC and the DA, as well as the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), was that the 30% overall pass mark is not factually correct.

Minister of Basic Education and DA member, Siviwe Gwarube, said that “there is no such thing as a 30% overall pass mark”.

Gwarube explained that learners need to meet a three-tiered set of subject requirements, including at least 40% in their home language and 40% in two other subjects, to receive a National Senior Certificate (NSC).

The threshold of 30% applies to three additional subjects on top of this. She added that higher thresholds are in place for obtaining admission to a diploma or bachelor’s studies.

The minister further added that, out of the 724,000 learners who wrote the NSC exams in 2024, only 189 passed with the minimum requirements, rather than achieving a bachelor’s pass.

“So the minimum requirements are not the norm,” she said. “That is just 0.003% of the overall number.” 

Wynand Boschoff from FF+ described the 30% pass mark controversy as a “popular work of fiction” used to “score political points without addressing the actual, very complicated problem” of South Africa’s broken education system.

On the other hand, proponents of the motion will likely be the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the Patriotic Alliance (PA) and the United Democratic Movement (UDM).

All of these parties agreed with Maimane’s argument that, although the 30% pass mark doesn’t apply to overall marks, any 30% threshold lowers standards and harms learners’ futures. 

South Africa ‘burying children’s potential’

Busaphi Machi from the IFP argued that the 30% threshold creates a “false sense of achievement: and prepares children for disappointment, not success. 

The EFF’s Mandla Shikwambana argued that “when a nation lowers the bar for its children, it is not raising their chances, but burying their potential.”

“Let us speak honestly, a child who passes with 30% will not become an engineer. That child will not become a pilot, a doctor, an auditor, an accountant or an IT specialist. These are professions that build nations,” he said. 

The Minister and the DA responded, however, that raising the pass mark will increase the risk of dropouts and does nothing to address South Africa’s real education crisis: that 81% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning. 

The current system that allows learners to pass matric with over 40% for three subjects and over 30% for another three subjects was implemented when the old Senior Certificate (SC) was replaced with the NSC in 2008.

In a 2013 Umalusi Discussion document, it was argued that the old system’s pass mark is often cited at 50%, but this is not correct. 

Umalusi explains that the old system distinguished between Higher Grade, Standard Grade and Lower Grade, and allowed learners who failed a higher-grade subject with a score between 25 and 39% to convert this to a standard-grade pass.

The final vote will take place in the National Assembly Plenary this afternoon.