The Eastern Cape department of education will investigate why districts such as Port Elizabeth which are known for producing good matric results, continue to perform badly.
Despite the department developing a transformation plan, many districts in the province continue to perform dismally.
The PE district alone has been on a downward spiral since 2014 when the pass rate went from 82% to 74% in 2015. It dropped further in 2016 to 64%.
Addressing a press conference this week, education head Ray Tywakadi said high-flying districts such as Port Elizabeth had traditionally kept the province up in terms of pass rate and that the drop had made a significant dent in the overall performance of the province.
He said schools which received a pass rate of between 90% to 100% in 2014, had dropped from 15% to just 8% “which means they lost big time … and this led to a shift in PE”.
He said that while northern areas schools in the metro had continued to perform well, the variations caused by peri-urban and rural schools led to a “substantive instability that impacted even the northern areas schools”.
“As the department we take the blame. Things were placed at the doorstep of the department to do, weren’t done.”
He said the department would go to the schools where pass rates had dropped significantly, to look at what the problems were.