Only 30 per cent of learners that sat for their Namibia Senior Secondary Certificate Ordinary (NSSCO) exams in the ||Kharas Region managed to you acquire three C + grading to advance to the Advanced Subsidiary (AS) level.
About 1166 candidates sat for the NSSCO examination, with only 350 qualifying for the AS level admission, should they be interested, while 134 candidates wrote the AS examinations.
These figures were revealed by the ||Kharas Region’s Acting Director of Education, Arts and Culture, Jesmine Magerman, responding to questions by this new agency.
“I want to congratulate all of the learners who did well and their dedicated teachers for their hard work. Every year we enrol new learners in Grade 11 and for AS level, learners with different expectations for themselves and who have different levels of self-motivation and dedication to achieve success and, therefore, our results will differ from one year to another,” she said.
The region’s ranking dropped from second place in 2022 to third place in 2023 for the NSSCO results, to this the acting director said; “Despite the drop in rankings, the results, if compared to results in 2022, our schools improved overall from 32 per cent to 37 per cent for C+ grading. There was also improvement in the results of geography, accounting, economics, with entrepreneurship being regarded as the best improvement from 33 per cent to 61 per cent for C+ symbols obtained,” she said.
She added that there was a dropped in performance in history, while the area of concern remains mathematics, although there was an improvement from 7 per cent to 14 per cent C+ grades obtained.
The acting director said later this month the directorate will have a consultation meeting with principals, teachers and other stakeholders, where the 2023 results from Grade 4 to AS level will be scrutinized and analysed to develop an annual plan to improve results.
“The interventions proposed by the principals should be practical and achievable to ensure that it impacts on the learner performance. The implementation of the plan should be monitored throughout the year and interventions that were successful in 2023 will be built on,” she added.
She said one of the challenges faced by the region is the lack of senior education officers for subjects such as social sciences, geography, history, development studies and all commerce subjects.
She added that plans to address this issue are underway.