The education ROI: data shows smart schooling delivers a 12% ‘learning dividend’

For decades, the “return on investment” in South African education has been hard to measure. Parents often pay premiums for prestigious traditional schools, relying on reputation rather than results. Yet in an economy driven by data, AI, and rapid change, hope is no longer a strategy.

South African parents manage risk in every other part of life, hedging currencies, diversifying portfolios, and insuring assets. But when it comes to their child’s education, many still rely on a model built for the industrial economy of the 20th century. Teneo, a leading online private school, has released the findings of a multiyear analysis that fundamentally shifts this conversation from “reputation” to “measurable result”.

“Parents are making one of the most important investments of their children’s lives, and to date they’ve had to rely on reputation as a proxy for individual results,” says Saul Geffen, CEO of Teneo School and founder of theSmart School System. “We’ve tested our model properly, across thousands of learners. The data is clear: when targeted academic support is triggered early, learners’ marks improve.” By analysing the performance of over 5,000 learners, Teneo has demonstrated that a data-led education model doesn’t just maintain standards, it actively accelerates performance.

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The data reveals that learners in the TeneoSmart School Systemsee their average grades rise by 12% in their first year. The data is clear: when targeted academic support is triggered early, learners’ marks improve,” says Geffen. For the business-minded parent, this provides the metric that matters: a consistent, compounding return on their child’s educational effort.

The structural weakness of the traditional brick-and-mortar model is the “data lag”. A learner typically struggles in silence for months, missing a concept in February, struggling with homework in March, before a test result in April finally triggers an intervention. In a fast-moving global economy, this latency is a liability.

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