Staff Reporter
The Department of Basic Education (DBE) has defended the integrity of the National Senior Certificate (NSC) exams after the Freedom Front Plus (VF Plus) said that public schools should be able to choose alternative examination authorities, following a limited breach in the 2025 exam cycle.
The breach was detected during marking, through internal controls, and prompted a national investigation, including suspensions and criminal and disciplinary processes.
In a briefing in December, Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube said the anomaly was first flagged on 2 December in Gauteng, and the subsequent probe found that three subjects — English Home Language, Mathematics and Physical Sciences — had been accessed before the exams and shared via a USB storage device, affecting a small number of learners in seven schools in Pretoria.
But the VF Plus said the incident strengthened its long-running criticism of the department’s “monopoly” over public school exams.
“[P]ublic schools should be afforded the opportunity to choose which examination board they wish to use. If the Department refuses to relinquish its monopoly on managing schools’ final exclamations, though, parents will increasingly start looking into independent education,” the party said on 31 December.
In a statement issued on Sunday, the DBE rejected the suggestion that the NSC system was fundamentally compromised, saying robust systems are measured by detection and response rather than the absence of attempted breaches.
Umalusi, the statutory quality-assurance body, oversees the readiness of both public and private assessment bodies and must approve the release of national examination results. In October, it said it had audited the state’s readiness for the 2025 end-of-year exams across the DBE, IEB and SACAI systems.
In its readiness briefing, Umalusi reported 766,543 full-time candidates registered to write the NSC under the DBE system (excluding part-time candidates), compared with 17,427 under the IEB and 6,174 under SACAI. The DBE has separately said total NSC candidate numbers for 2025 were above 900,000 when including part-time candidates.
In its statement, DBE Director-General Mathanzima Mweli said: “The Department of Basic Education rejects the insinuation that the integrity of the National Senior Certificate is in terminal decline or that public schooling is structurally incapable of safeguarding assessment standards.”
“Public confidence in the education system is best sustained through evidence-based discourse, institutional accountability, and continued systemic strengthening, not conjecture or sensationalism,” said Mweli.
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