By Laura Grant

A lot has been written about the 2024 matric exam results so rather than rehashing the same information I looked through the results to see what ‘sparks of joy’ I could find other than the overall pass rate of 87.2%

Bachelor passes

Take the number of bachelor passes, for instance. More than 330,000 learners passed their exams well enough to apply to study at a university. What that means is nearly half of 2024’s grade 12s (47.8%) got the highest-level pass, aka, a bachelor pass.

Girls are steaming ahead of boys with 49.2% of them earning bachelor passes.

Girls have outnumbered boys in grade 12 classrooms for at least the past four years. Since 2021 about 56% of learners were girls, so it’s little wonder that more girls earned bachelor passes in 2024 than boys – 51,000 more, if you want put a number on it.

Education experts have expressed concern about the disparity in numbers between boys and girls in grade 12 because it’s a sign that boys may be struggling in the education system.

More girls than boys