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%.
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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.
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