Despite complications and disruptions caused by COVID-19 in 2020, Balmoral College again succeeded in achieving a 100% matric pass rate, as it did continuously over the previous 12 years.
Lucy Nyasvisvo, Balmoral College’s Economics teacher, who won two awards last year in recognition of her teaching skills.
Of the total 72 matric learners, as many as 65 – or 90,27% – attained university entrance passes.
The school was rated the top school in the Ekurhuleni South district in 2020. With a total of 1643 learners, from Grade R through to Grade 12, in attendance, it maintained excellent pass rates for the school as a whole, averaging 95%.
Balmoral College, which is situated next door to ACTOM’s head office and factories site at Knights in Germiston, is one of the main beneficiaries of the group’s diverse social responsibility programme,
“Other outstanding achievements by the matric class last year were that their average mark in Mathematics was 63%, in both History and Tourism they averaged 75% and in English 71%,” said Cobus Matthee, the school’s HOD for Further Education & Training (FET).
The top achieving matriculant was Munashe Kasinauyo with seven distinctions, followed by Muano Makumbane with six distinctions and Juliet Monare with five distinctions.
Three Balmoral College teachers were presented with awards at the district’s annual matric awards ceremony for the best results in their subjects. They are Roan Halgryn for Tourism, Gugulethu Tshuma for Life Sciences and Lucy Nyasvisvo for Economics. In addition, the City of Ekurhuleni presented Ms Nyasvisvo with a special award for being an outstanding educator in Economics.
When the COVID-19 pandemic made its appearance early last year, necessitating the imposition by government of a series of lockdowns starting with the Stage 5 hard lockdown towards the end of March which forbade live teaching in schools for several weeks, Balmoral College wasted no time about putting in place the necessary procedures to provide remote learning online to ensure that all learners could continue to be taught without interruption and so keep pace with the school curriculum. Learners were provided with resources packs containing learning material and work sheets to guide them in home study and in support of the regular online sessions the teachers conducted with them during the hard lockdown period.
“When learners were allowed to come back to school, we weren’t permitted to have all grades in attendance at the same time, so we introduced a rotational timetable to ensure that they got all the teaching instruction they needed. This involved having extended teaching days and extra classes on Saturdays to make up for time lost,” said Matthee.