Three years ago, Daily Maverick visited Lavender Hill High School in Cape Town, which had a matric pass rate just under 70%, to explore the stories of success and adversity behind the statistics. Returning in 2026, we found the pass rate had risen to 89% for the class of 2025 – a 20% jump. The class of 2025 at Lavender Hill High School in Cape Town has achieved a matric pass rate of 89%, up by 20% from 69.2% in 2023.
Principal Fuad Viljoen told Daily Maverick that the achievement was the product of hard work and determination. The school had already increased its matric pass rate to 80.3% for 2024, even as its throughput rate – the number of pupils who stayed in school to the end of their matric year – increased steadily. Viljoen, who has a South African flag pinned to the wall of his office, said: “We are fiercely and passionately South African, and our DNA, I think, is a bit different to other nations.
Adversity actually makes us stronger, actually pushes us to persevere and excel, and that’s the true spirit of being at Lavender Hill High School.” “What normally happens is that the Grade 12 teachers get all the credit. But it didn’t start in Grade 12. It started in Grade 8…
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where teachers play a role in the success of these learners by laying the foundation,” he said. Of the 130 matrics from Lavender Hill who wrote the 2025 National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations, 51 achieved a bachelor’s degree pass, up from 32 in 2024. The pupil with the top results from Lavender Hill’s class of 2025 was Sandiego Ruiters (19), who described the achievement as a “winning feeling”.
The moment his name was read last on the list of top achievers at the school on Tuesday had been an emotional one. “I feel excited… Before I found out I was a bit nervous because this is the first time for the class of 2025 that I’m [ranked] first,” he told Daily Maverick.
The path to matric was difficult for Ruiters. In 2021, when he was 15, he was shot in a drive-by shooting outside his cousin’s house. “[My cousin] was supposed to send me a game on the phone so that we can play, and we were sitting in front of his house when there was a was a drive-by shooting incident.
It wasn’t gang members from the area that we were used to seeing, so it was people we didn’t know and people who didn’t know us. They just took a chance and assumed that we, as 15-year-old kids, were gangsters,” he said.
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