It is simply unacceptable that we have such poor matric results in such an unacceptably high number of South African public schools. It is wholly without justification that our statistics show that of our university graduates, only 22% of 60 000 students graduated within the specified number of years.
With the result that, to use Heather Dugmore’s words, our universities “become playgrounds for those who completed a substandard matric (instead of) places of higher education established to nurture top academic skills” But, as Professor Ruksana Osman, Head of the Wits School of Education pointed out so correctly: “To look at the end result, Matric, and declare the public education system is failing without attending to the issues in early learning gives us a distorted picture of the schooling system as a whole.” She makes it clear that she is arguing “for looking at the teaching and learning  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  input from the earliest stage of schooling and not just the final output of schooling – the matric examination results.” This same point has been made by many others and I could not agree more.