Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube hailed the Class of 2025 for achieving South Africa’s highest-ever National Senior Certificate pass rate of 88%, with a record 345,000 bachelor’s passes despite challenges in gateway subjects. Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube announced a record national pass rate of 88% for the 2025 National Senior Certificate (NSC) exams. This figure represents a steady 0.7% increase from 2024.
More than 656,000 learners successfully passed their exams, and a record 345,000 of them earned bachelor’s passes despite a minor decline from 48% to 46% in that category. For the first time, all 75 education districts in South Africa achieved pass rates of above 80%. Gwarube highlighted district performance as a key measure of system-wide progress versus isolated pockets, affirming growing stability while calling for intensified efforts toward equality, particularly in gateway subjects.
Gwarube began her address by speaking plainly about the health of South Africa’s education system, its progress, areas where quality improvement was required, and the need for strengthened foundations. She said education had long shaped South Africa’s national story, driving opportunity and social mobility across generations, with today’s system reflecting that history alongside the unfinished push for equity. Marked by deep inequality, she said, education is the country’s strongest tool for fostering cohesion.
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“South Africans, we cannot be content to keep the system running with its deepest problems remaining untouched. We must choose a new course for basic education, and that new course has already begun with evidence-based reform focused on quality learning and teaching,” she said. Gwarube said that to grasp the scale of the education reforms required, the system’s size needed to be taken into account: it serves about 13.5 million learners, backed by more than 460,000 educators at nearly 25,000 schools, managed through hundreds of circuit offices, 75 districts and nine provincial departments.
The 2025 NSC examinations were among the largest and most complex operations in the country, with more than 900,000 candidates writing exams at about 6,000 centres. Millions of scripts were set, printed, written, marked and quality-assured, with irregularities swiftly investigated and addressed, and weaknesses addressed by strengthened controls and consequence management. Gwarube confronted the persistent myth of a 30% matric pass mark, urging leaders and the public to abandon misconceptions that undermine learner confidence.
“Not every single learner who attends a school intends to go to obtain a university degree. Some intend to obtain skills in the world of work, some intend on doing different things, which our education system allows. When we use this sloganism, we discourage learners who are differently talented in the system,” she said.
Gwarube traced the story of the Class of 2025 from its origins in 2014, highlighting the resilience of these young learners who persevered through tough times, including the Covid-19 disruptions during their Grade 8 year. Retention rates remained robust at 84% from Grade 1 through Grade 10 for this cohort, reflecting steady progression for most learners. However, dropout rates sharpened significantly between grades 11 and 12, reducing the initial 1.2 million starters in 2014 to 778,000 full-time NSC candidates in 2025. Despite this narrowing, several encouraging stability indicators emerged: a higher proportion of age-appropriate 18-year-olds sat for the exams this year, the share of registered learners who did not write dropped dramatically from 17% in 2017 to only 2%, and the number of part-time candidates continued to decline, signalling improved system retention and exam participation overall.
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