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At odds with the idea that South Africa’s rising matric pass rate means that school education is improving, research by The Common Sense shows that in the subjects that matter most, no real progress is being made.

The chart below shows ten years of data for the number of children writing matric and the matric pass rate.

The number of children writing matric has been on a steady upward trajectory for the past decade, rising from somewhere between 500 000 and 600 000 pupils to now between 700 000 and 800 000. As that has happened, the pass rate has risen from between 70.0% and 75.0% to a figure approaching 90.0%.

These are statistics that the government likes to quote in defence of its education policy efforts, but parents need to understand a few things about what's going on inside those numbers. The first thing is the fact that a child is able to pass matric tells you next to nothing at all.

Children can pass with a grade of 40.0% in their home language and two other subjects, and 30.0% in three more. In practice, you’d have to be functionally illiterate to do worse than that.

Parents therefore need to measure school outcomes in terms of something more demanding. The best such measure is performance in mathematics and physical sciences. Strong results in these subjects are important for entry into fields such as engineering, medicine, the sciences, accounting, and commerce – and a prosperous middle-class future beyond that.

The chart below shows the number of matric pupils each year, compared to the number who wrote mathematics, and the number who passed that subject with a grade of 50.0% or above.

The chart below shows the maths numbers as a share of the matric class.

What these data show is firstly that the share of pupils writing mathematics has fallen from between 40.0% and 50.0% to 34.1%, while the share of all matric writers passing maths remains stuck at a level of around or below 10.0%.

The next chart shows what share of the pupils who wrote mathematics went on to pass with a grade of 50.0% or higher.

The chart shows that this figure had lifted modestly to sit at 25.0% in 2025.

The charts below set out the same data for physical sciences.

The three physical sciences charts above show the same kind of pattern as the maths data.

The idea, therefore, that the rising number of children writing matric and the rising pass rate represents an improvement in the overall output of South Africa’s school system is largely misleading. Given the structure of South Africa’s GDP the only accurate way to get a real sense whether the education system is improving is to look at what share of the matric class is getting good passes in mathematics and physical sciences. And there the progress is very limited.