Young boffins: Mathematics trains the mind and teaches learners how to confront complexity without panic, how to break problems down, how to test
assumptions and how to think and reason logically even through difficulty. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
South Africa is celebrating.
A record-breaking 88% National Senior Certificate (NSC) pass rate, achieved by the largest cohort of learners in the country’s history, is being applauded, quite rightly, as a “hallmark of resilience”.
It is presented as a testament to the fortitude of a cohort that began schooling in 2013, at the introduction of a new curriculum and went on to experience the disruption of Covid-19 in their final year of primary schooling, followed by years of loadshedding during high school.
It is a comforting story. It reassures us that, against all odds, the system is working, learners are succeeding and the country is, somehow, moving forward.
But like many comforting stories, this one depends on what is left out. When the numbers are examined more closely, a far less comforting picture emerges. That picture is the collapse of pure Mathematics within the NSC, to the point where it now stands apart from every other gateway subject.
In 2025, the national Mathematics pass rate, calculated at the very low threshold of 30%, declined from 69% to 64%. This drop was sharper than that of any other gateway subject and it left Mathematics as the only gateway subject nationally with a pass rate below 70%.
Physical Sciences, which is often regarded as equally demanding, was the next weakest gateway subject, yet it still recorded a pass rate of about 77%. The gap between the two weakest gateway subjects now stands at 13%, which signals that Mathematics is isolated in its underperformance.
This isolation is replicated at provincial level. With the exception of the Western Cape, which recorded a Mathematics pass rate of 73.7%, Mathematics remains the only gateway subject with pass rates below 70% across provinces.
However, Western Cape’s outlier status should not be misread as a success story. The province has the second-lowest Mathematics participation rate in the country, which means its relatively stronger performance is drawn from a highly selective cohort, rather than from broad mathematical competence.
In other words, fewer learners write Mathematics in the Western Cape and those who do are more carefully filtered.
Across provinces, then, it is clear that Mathematics is being sidelined within the NSC. No other gateway subject displays this pattern of consistent underperformance across the country. The problem, therefore, cannot be attributed to a particular province, a difficult examination paper or an unusually weak cohort. It is systemic.
Performance statistics alone, however, still understate the depth of the problem. More concerning still is not only how learners performed in Mathematics, but how many were never given the opportunity to perform at all.
In 2025, only 34% of matric candidates wrote Mathematics. In other words, two out of every three learners exited the schooling system without engaging with pure Mathematics at Grade 12 level. This is happening in the very same year that South Africa is celebrating the largest matric cohort ever, with more than 900 000 learners writing the NSC.
In absolute terms, just over 254 000 learners wrote Mathematics in 2025. That number is lower than the number who wrote Mathematics in 2021, 2022 and 2023, despite the total number of matric candidates increasing year on year.
There was an increase of just under 3000 learners compared to 2024, however, in relative terms, it is a decrease of just over 5%. The system is expanding but Mathematics is shrinking within that expansion.
And even among those who did take the subject, the picture deteriorates in a concerning way once the pass rate is unpacked. Of the 254 415 learners who wrote Mathematics, 162 947 achieved 30% or above. That is the figure that produces the much-celebrated 64% pass rate. But the moment one stops pretending that 30% represents “competence”, the national picture changes in a dramatic and concerning way.
Of the learners that “passed” Mathematics, only 106 570 achieved 40% or above and just 63 813 achieved 50% or above. Put differently, if 40% were used as the pass mark, the national Mathematics pass rate would drop to 41.9%. If 50% were the pass mark, it would fall further to a devastating 25.1%.
What this means, in practical terms, is that 75% of Mathematics candidates exited the system without having understood, never mind mastered, even half of the curriculum. Many of those we say have passed managed to complete 12 years of schooling without acquiring the analytical and problem-solving capacities that Mathematics is meant to develop.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the celebration. We are producing more passes than ever before, while simultaneously producing fewer mathematically capable school-leavers. The system, as it is today, rewards certification but pays little attention to what that certificate represents or enables.
The Western Cape is a perfect case in point. Approximately 75% of its learners did not write Mathematics at all. Its Maths participation rate is 10% below the national average, yet its Maths pass rate is the highest in the country.
This performance is widely celebrated, even though it was clearly achieved on the back of mass exclusion from the subject. When success depends on narrowing the pool of candidates, strong results become easier to manufacture.
The question, then, is not whether the Western Cape performs well in Mathematics but who is allowed to perform in the first place.Of course, a high pass rate is not necessarily meaningless. But it becomes dangerous when it is pursued without regard for how learners pass and what happens after they do.
If the objective of the NSC qualification is simply to maximise the number of learners who cross the finish line and to stop asking questions once they have crossed it, then we should indeed celebrate a pass rate in which 75% of learners do not understand even half of the Grade 12 Mathematics curriculum. And if we do not care about post-school outcomes, then we should indeed celebrate the fact that Western Cape’s 73.7% Maths pass rate, achieved while 75% of its matriculants did not write pure Mathematics at all.
But those are not the criteria by which the NSC claims to measure success. The Department of Basic Education describes the NSC as a qualification intended to equip learners with the knowledge and skills necessary for meaningful participation in society, to provide access to higher education, to facilitate transition into the workplace and to offer employers a credible profile of a learner’s competence.
These are literal objectives of the NSC qualification and they provide a standard against which outcomes must be judged.
Measured against that standard, not much is actually there to celebrate. The 88% pass rate does not, in any way, suggest that the majority of learners are equipped with the knowledge, skills and capabilities that the NSC itself claims to deliver. It tells us only that a large number of learners crossed a very low assessment threshold.
But what matters is where that threshold leads. At present, all the evidence suggests that for too many young people, it leads straight back into the very social and economic reality we claim to be educating them out of.
If the NSC’s objectives were being met, the reality beyond the school gates would look very different. Youth unemployment would not remain so high.
Graduate unemployment would not be rising. Universities would not be turning away thousands of applicants each year. Young people would not be standing in endless queues for the R350 social relief grant or becoming vulnerable to crime. Yet this remains the status quo.
In this context, celebrating an 88% pass rate risks confusing administrative success with educational success. Administrative success benefits systems, officials, politicians, and reputations but never the students.
The system behaves as though we do not care about what happens after the finish line. If we did care, we would by now have internalised that youth unemployment is lowest in STEM-related fields, and that Mathematics is the gateway to those fields.
If we did care, we would have recognised that a 30% pass mark defeats the purpose of studying in the first place because it certifies exposure rather than capability.
And if we were honest, we would have confronted the fact that Mathematical Literacy functions as a slow intellectual poison.
The importance of Mathematics as a subject, however, is not limited to employment prospects. Mathematics trains the mind and teaches learners how to confront complexity without panic, how to break problems down, how to test assumptions and how to think and reason logically even through difficulty. These are important skills every young person needs to survive in the outside world.
A country that does not teach its children to think mathematically cannot sustain a modern economy.
It cannot industrialise or compete in data-driven industries. It cannot be at the forefront of science, artificial intelligence, or technological innovation. Nor can it expect citizens to engage critically with budgets, statistics and evidence. To deny learners these capacities is to intellectually disarm them.
Yet this is precisely the danger we are normalising.
Dr Mamokgethi Phakeng is a renowned academic-turned-businesswoman with over two decades of executive experience in higher education in South Africa.