Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga has threatened to charge Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Gavin Davis with unethical conduct for writing an open letter to Umalusi in which he questioned the standardisation of matric results.

Motshekga made the threat in a letter sent to DA chief whip John Steenhuisen on Monday.

She charged that Davis had released classified information and violated principles of confidentiality that are crucial to the integrity of the school examination system after attending the National Standardisation Meeting in December, where Umalusi, the Quality Council for General and Further Education and Training, and the department discussed the 2016 matric results.

“One of the cornerstones of an integrous examination system is the security and confidentiality of classified information,” Motshekga said.

She accused Davis of violating “the fundamental tenets of confidentiality relation to the national senior certificate” by refusing to sign a confidentiality agreement submitted to all participants at the meeting, taking pictures of the event, and leaving with a standardisation booklet that contained raw results data.

Davis has openly conceded that he refused to sign the agreement and took the booklet.

Following the meeting, Davis penned an open letter to the CEO of Umalusi, Mafu Ramoketsi, in which he questioned the upward adjustment of marks in 28 subjects.

“To sum up, there is reason to believe that the standardisation process may lead to an artificial inflation of the matric marks this year,” he wrote.

Davis added that the upward adjustment would not be a problem in and of itself if it could be demonstrated that “these adjustments were effected due to the increased cognitive demand of the exam papers”.

“However, at this stage, no such evidence has been forthcoming.”

Davis said on Tuesday that he believed he had done nothing wrong and would in fact have failed in his oversight duties as an MP if he had not raised his concerns about the process.

An eventual charge by the minister could see him dragged before Parliament’s ethics committee, but he noted that the meeting had not taken place in the legislature but in another forum.