On 12 January 2026, Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube announced that the Class of 2025 had achieved an 88 per cent pass rate in the National Senior Certificate, the highest in South African history. More than 656,000 of over 900,000 candidates passed. For the first time, all 75 education districts cleared 80 per cent.
That is a real achievement and it deserves to be read as one. It is also not the number a parent choosing a Grade 10 curriculum should be looking at.
The figures underneath the headline
Three movements matter more than the pass rate.
Mathematics fell from a 69 per cent pass rate to 64 per cent. Accounting fell from 81 per cent to 78 per cent. Physical Science ticked up from 76 to 77 per cent. Gwarube named gateway subject performance as the area requiring intensified effort, and she was right to. Those are the subjects that determine whether a child can study engineering, medicine, actuarial science or accounting.
Bachelor passes hit a record 345,000, an increase of more than 8,000 on 2024. As a proportion, they fell from 48 per cent to 46 per cent. Both statements are accurate. More children than ever qualified for degree study, and a slightly smaller share of the cohort did.
Retention is the third figure. Gwarube noted that roughly 84 per cent of learners reach Grade 10, with significant drop-off between Grades 11 and 12. ActionSA ran the cohort calculation against the 1.14 million pupils who entered Grade 10 in 2023 and put effective completion at 57.7 per cent. It is a different measure answering a different question, and it is worth holding alongside the headline rather than instead of it.
The Independent Examinations Board reported 98.3 per cent for its 2025 candidates, slightly down on the 98.47 per cent of 2024. IEB candidates are a smaller, largely independent-school cohort, so the two figures are not comparable in any direct sense.
What a parent should take from this
The national pass rate tells you about the health of a system. It does not tell you what will happen to your child. What determines that is subject choice in Grade 9, the quality of teaching in mathematics and the sciences, and whether your child is in a room where those subjects are taught by someone who studied them.
Which brings you to the question of examining body.
CAPS, IEB and SACAI, briefly
Parents routinely confuse curriculum with examining body. They are separate things.
CAPS, the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement, is the national curriculum. It sets out what is taught in every grade. It does not set the final examination.
The National Senior Certificate is the qualification. Several bodies are authorised to examine towards it, and all of them are quality assured by Umalusi, the council responsible for the credibility of South African qualifications.
The Department of Basic Education examines the majority of candidates. The Independent Examinations Board examines an independent-school cohort and sets its own papers against the national curriculum, with a reputation for question styles that lean towards application and extended reasoning rather than recall. SACAI, the South African Comprehensive Assessment Institute, is an independent assessment body registered with Umalusi that administers CAPS examinations for home-educated and distance learners.
A child sitting an IEB paper and a child sitting a departmental paper both receive a National Senior Certificate. Both certificates carry the same standing with South African universities. The difference is in how the questions are set and marked, not in the value of the document at the end.
Choosing between them
The honest answer is that it depends on the child.
The IEB style suits a learner who reasons well under open-ended questioning and who is heading towards competitive degree programmes. It asks for interpretation rather than reproduction, which rewards some children and unsettles others.
The departmental and SACAI route suits families who want the national curriculum administered without the independent-school fee structure, and it is the established path for home education in South Africa. SACAI has administered examinations for home-educated candidates for years, which matters if your child is not sitting in a school building.
Either way, ask a school three questions. Who examines my child at the end of Grade 12. Who teaches mathematics, and what did they study. What happened to the previous cohort in gateway subjects specifically, not overall.
Schools that cannot answer the third question, or that answer it with a pass rate rather than a subject breakdown, are telling you something.
Where online schools fit
Families moving to online schooling for academic reasons, rather than for convenience, are usually solving one problem: getting a subject specialist in front of their child for mathematics or physical science.
CambriLearn, an accredited online private school with live timetabled lessons taught by specialist teachers, is registered with both SACAI and the IEB and offers six curriculum pathways. Details of the IEB pathway and the CAPS curriculum are set out separately, including which grades are currently available on each. The school has taught more than 80,000 students across 100 countries in almost two decades.
The 2025 results were the best South Africa has recorded. They also showed maths slipping and drop-off concentrated between Grades 11 and 12. Choose for the child in front of you, using the subject numbers rather than the headline.
Figures cited are from the Department of Basic Education’s 2025 National Senior Certificate results announcement of 12 January 2026 and the Independent Examinations Board’s 2025 results release. CambriLearn is accredited by Cognia and Pearson Edexcel, and registered with SACAI and the IEB.
- Read the 2025 matric results properly before you choose a curriculum - September 18, 2026
- The exam centre question most parents only ask in Grade 11 - September 11, 2026
- What the BELA Act changed for homeschooling families, and what it left alone - September 4, 2026
