Well done: It is true that more learners are completing school, often under extremely difficult conditions. This
is a welcome development that should not be taken lightly. It should be roundly celebrated.
South Africa’s 2025 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results were greeted with the usual celebration.
An 88% national pass rate and record numbers of bachelor’s passes were presented as proof that the schooling system is improving and delivering success at scale.
There is some truth in this. More learners are completing school, often under extremely difficult conditions and that achievement should not be dismissed.
But as a single number, the pass rate tells us almost nothing about whether the system is preparing young people for what comes next. If we want to understand the real meaning of the NSC results, we need to move beyond headline outcomes and examine the structure of performance beneath them.
Education systems behave like complex adaptive systems. When pressure is applied at one point – for example, to improve pass rates – the system does not respond in a simple, linear way. It adapts.
Learners are redistributed across subjects, pathways are adjusted and risk is managed locally by schools and districts. This can improve overall stability while quietly hollowing out depth in the very subjects that matter most for the country’s future.
To read the NSC results properly, we need a complexity lens.
Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Accounting are gateway subjects that regulate access to engineering, medicine, the natural sciences, data science, finance and most technical fields.
Weaknesses here flow directly into universities, technical colleges and the national skills pipeline. In 2025, only about 34% of matric candidates wrote Mathematics, with most learners taking Mathematical Literacy instead.
Mathematics and Accounting pass rates declined, while Physical Sciences improved only slightly. At the same time, about 345 000 learners achieved bachelor’s passes, creating the impression of a strong pipeline into higher education.
The reality is more constrained. The pool of learners genuinely prepared for STEM-intensive (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and high-skill professional fields is far smaller than the headline figures suggest.
At the minimum 30% threshold, Mathematics performance appears relatively healthy: roughly two-thirds of candidates pass. Physical Sciences looks stronger still, with around three-quarters passing at this level. These figures are often cited as evidence that foundational competence is improving. But this apparent strength collapses rapidly as expectations rise.
At the 50% level, Mathematics performance shrinks to about a quarter of those who wrote the subject. At the 60% level – a far more realistic benchmark for readiness for demanding tertiary study – only about one in seven candidates remain. Distinctions account for less than 2% of Mathematics candidates.
The pipeline does not narrow gradually. It contracts sharply.
Well done: It is true that more learners are completing school, often under extremely difficult conditions. This is a welcome development that should not be taken lightly. It should be roundly celebrated.
For every hundred learners entering the NSC system, only a handful leave with Mathematics or Physical Sciences marks that reliably support success in engineering, science, health or technology. This is not a marginal problem – it is a structural bottleneck.
The economic consequences are real. South Africa faces persistent skills shortages in these fields. When we fail to produce enough STEM-capable graduates, we import skills at high cost, constrain innovation and lock many young people out of growth sectors of the economy.
What is often missing from public debate is participation. Performance cannot be interpreted independently of how many learners are routed through a subject in the first place.
Mathematics participation varies dramatically across districts. In some, fewer than a quarter of learners take Mathematics. In others, close to half do. This represents a doubling of system load. Routing learners through Mathematics places significant cognitive, pedagogical and institutional stress on schools and districts.
It requires subject-specialist teachers, timetable flexibility, sustained learner support and consistent instructional quality. The number of learners taking this subject is not a neutral choice, but rather a measure of system stress.
Crucially, this load is not carried primarily by wealthy urban districts.
When gateway subject participation and performance are examined together, a striking pattern emerges.
Provinces such as Limpopo, the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga – often framed as underperforming in national debates – feature prominently when a different metric is applied: quality under load.
This distinction matters because all nine provinces recorded overall pass rates above 80% in 2025, with a relatively narrow spread between the highest-performing province (90.6%) and the lowest (84.17%).
Against such a compressed range, routinely labelling certain provinces as “bottom performers” is statistically weak and analytically misleading, particularly when these same provinces are carrying a disproportionate share of the system’s Mathematics and Physical Sciences load.
In terms of both participation and the number of learners achieving 60% or more in gateway subjects, these three largely rural provinces rank among the strongest nationally. At district level, many of the top-performing districts on these measures are in these provinces, with Limpopo particularly prominent.
The paradox is that these same provinces often appear among the weakest when judged purely on overall pass rates.
This should not be surprising. Districts that route large proportions of their cohorts through Mathematics are doing something fundamentally different from those that tightly restrict access. A district producing strong averages by selecting a small group of learners is not equivalent to one carrying nearly half its cohort through a high-demand subject and still producing solid outcomes. Performance statistics that ignore participation load run the risk of mistaking selectivity for quality.
What I wrote previously about schools in Limpopo’s Vhembe district remains true: these schools treat Mathematics as a priority for many, not a privilege for a few. They carry disproportionate system load and should be recognised as models of capacity-building, not dismissed as anomalies.
The growing emphasis on bachelor’s passes is understandable. Access to higher education matters. But a bachelor’s pass is a minimum eligibility criterion, not a guarantee of preparedness. It can be achieved without Mathematics or Physical Sciences and without high-level mastery in any gateway subject.
The system has responded rationally to this incentive. Mathematics participation remains low even as bachelor’s passes increase, while high-end performance in the gateway subjects remains thin.
Taken together, these incentives quietly but powerfully encourage schools and districts to steer learners towards Mathematical Literacy rather than Mathematics, not by policy directive but as a rational response to accountability pressure and risk.
From a complexity perspective, the system is optimising the wrong objective function. It is maximising throughput at the certification level rather than building resilience and depth at the gateway level.
Universities experience the consequences directly. Extended programmes, foundation provision and high attrition in STEM fields are not failures of higher education; they are rational responses to the gap between a matric certificate and readiness. These interventions cost billions and slow down the production of scarce skills.
As the minister of higher education has pointed out, more than 100 000 learners who qualify for university will not find places, not because they failed, but because system capacity is limited. With roughly 230 000 first-year university places for 345 000 bachelor’s passes, eligibility is clearly not the same as availability. The entire post-school system depends on learners with strong marks, not just minimum credentials.
The minister of basic education rightly highlighted that all 75 districts achieved pass rates above 80% in 2025. But she also pointed to the real crisis: learner retention.
Nationally, only 84% of learners move from grade 10 to grade 11 and 78% from grade 11 to grade 12. Large numbers drift through the system before disappearing, particularly boys, who vanish from both statistics and public concern.
Where lower retention coincides with higher performance, this pattern must be interrogated carefully using data, not assumptions. Attrition can inflate averages just as surely as selectivity can.
This is why South Africa needs to measure what matters.
As early as 2019, the National Development Plan emphasised the importance of achieving 60% performance in gateway subjects. That remains the relevant benchmark for building future capacity. Too few schools and districts are close to this target.
Education systems are complex adaptive systems. When incentives reward stability without depth, the system adapts accordingly. If we want different outcomes, we must align measurement and incentives with capability, not just certification.
A complexity-aware reading of the NSC asks deeper questions: who takes gateway subjects; how performance thins as standards rise; where load is concentrated and which districts convert participation into mastery most effectively. Districts, not provinces, are the right unit of analysis. Rural load-bearing districts should be studied and supported as sources of system intelligence.
South Africa does not lack effort in its schools, nor data about performance. It suffers from over-reliance on a single, comforting indicator.
The 2025 NSC pass rate tells us that many learners are surviving the system. The deeper structure of participation and performance tells us that far fewer are being prepared for what comes next.
If we are serious about development and economic transformation, we must move beyond celebration towards comprehension.
Only by seeing the system as it is – under load, unevenly stressed and structurally constrained – can we strengthen it where it matters most.
That is the real challenge the NSC results place before us.
Professor Azwinndini Muronga is a theoretical physicist and deputy vice-chancellor for Research, Innovation and Internationalisation at Nelson Mandela University.