Nelson Mandela Bay was the best performing education district in the Eastern Cape in 2017.
Addressing the media in East London on Friday, Education MEC, Mandla Makupula, said that the Nelson Mandela Bay Education District recorded a pass rate of 72.59%.
He said the second best performing education district was the Sarah Baartman District, which recorded a pass rate of 71%.
Makupula said they were the only two of the 12 education districts in the Eastern Cape to record pass rates of over 70%.
He said the worst performing education districts in the province were Amathole West and Amathole East, with pass rates of just 53.6% and just over 56%.
Meanwhile, MEC Makupula said that the 5.7% improvement in the province's matric pass rate in 2017 over 2016, was a significant achievement.
The Eastern Cape recorded a pass rate of 65% last year, following intervention in this and other poor performing provinces by the National Department of Basic Education the year before.
The Eastern Cape, however, remained bottom of the class and with Limpopo, were the only two provinces to record pass rates of below 70 percent.
Makupula said the improvement in the pass rate was a result of an education transformation plan introduced by the Bhisho government in 2016.
"This Department, guided by the Provincial Government, developed an Education Systems Transformation Plan, which we adopted in 2016, a three-year plan that had seven pillars. We paid attention to that and 2017 therefore, was the second academic year of the three-year plan," he said.
Makupula also said that the number of Eastern Cape learners who were eligible to read for a bachelors degree increased from 18% in 2016 to 23% in 2017.
He said the number of learners who passed with distinctions climbed from 2.1% overall in the country in 2016 to 2.3% overall in the country in 2017, adding that although marginal, it still represented a positive upward move.
