By Johnathan Paoli
Over the past three academic years and into the 2025 National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations, South Africa’s schooling system has continued to display a troubling contradiction: steadily improving matric pass rates alongside persistently high learner dropout across earlier grades.
While the release of the results marked another record year for pass rates, the data still points to significant attrition long before learners reach Grade 12.
During the release of the 2025 NSC results, Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube provided new insight into the scale and location of learner attrition.
She noted that in 2014, approximately 1.2 million children entered Grade 1, and by the time that cohort reached Grade 10 in 2023, enrolment had declined by only about 4%.
This, she said, demonstrated relatively strong retention through the early and middle years of schooling.
However, the pressure intensifies sharply in the final grades.
“Between Grades 10 and 12, a large number of learners begin to repeat, others even leave the school system,” Gwarube said.
The full-time Grade 12 class of 2025 comprised around 778,000 learners, underscoring the scale of attrition in the final phase.
Nationally, only about 84% of learners progress from Grade 10 to Grade 11, and approximately 78% from Grade 11 to Grade 12.
“These figures tell us something important. The largest dropout pressure is not across the whole system; it intensifies late, as learners move into Grades 11 and 12,” she said.
She cautioned that strong final pass rates cannot, on their own, be treated as evidence of system-wide quality.
“If learners exit the system before Grade 12, the system is not yet delivering quality at scale, regardless of how strong the final pass rate is,” Gwarube said.
In 2023, the education sector was emerging from the prolonged disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although overall learner attendance and enrolment stabilised, dropout pressures remained concentrated among older learners.
Many adolescents exited the system between Grades 10 and 12, often after repeating grades or falling behind academically.
A growing proportion of learners in the Further Education and Training phase were older than the typical age for their grade, reflecting delayed progression and heightened dropout risk.
The 2024 academic year illustrated that while the national matric pass rate climbed to around 87.3%, throughput rates, tracking progression from Grade 10 to Grade 12, regressed slightly compared with 2023.
Civil society research during the same period estimated that roughly one-third of South African children do not ultimately complete school, with many lost years before matric due to poverty, pregnancy, academic struggle, mental health challenges and caregiving responsibilities.
The 2025 results extended the trend of improved terminal outcomes.
The Class of 2025 achieved an official matric pass rate of approximately 88%, the highest in the country’s history.
Of those who wrote, 88% passed under Umalusi, while the Independent Examinations Board recorded a 98.3% pass rate.
There were also encouraging indicators of improved system stability.
Gwarube noted that the largest share of candidates were 18 years old, pointing to better on-time progression, while the proportion of learners unable to sit for any exam papers declined from around 17% in 2017 to about 2% in 2025.
Part-time repeat candidate numbers have also fallen, reflecting fewer learners needing to rewrite Grade 12.
“These trends matter because they point to a more stable system, and stability is the platform on which quality must now rise,” the minister said.
Yet concerns remain.
Advocacy organisations such as the Zero Dropout Campaign warn that around four in ten learners who start Grade 1 still fail to obtain a matric or equivalent qualification.
They argue that dropout is driven by cumulative socioeconomic stress rather than sudden academic failure, and that psychosocial support is critical to improving retention.
Gwarube stressed the need for honest engagement with the data, warning against practices that improve performance statistics at the expense of access.
“Where we see lower learner retention alongside higher performance, we must question that pattern carefully and fairly,” she said.
She called for stronger learner tracking and early warning systems to ensure intervention long before Grade 12.
The minister highlighted a growing gender imbalance, with girls now comprising 56% of matric candidates.
While this reflects stronger protections for the girl child, including the removal of pregnancy as a barrier to education, she warned that boys are increasingly being left behind and require urgent, targeted support.
As South Africa celebrates record matric outcomes in 2025, many agree that the true test of system health lies not only in pass rates, but in whether learners are supported to stay the course from the early grades through to completion.
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