South Africa’s real matric pass rate

South Africa’s “real” matric pass rate for 2024 is 55.9%, markedly lower than the figure announced by the Department of Basic Education (DBE).
Basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube announced the matric pass rate on Monday, 13 January 2025, revealing that the class of 2024 achieved a pass rate of 87.3%.
From a cohort of 724,156 learners who enrolled as full-time Grade 12 learners in 2024, 705,291 wrote their final examinations.
615,429 of these learners passed their National Senior Certificate, the highest number in South Africa’s history.
“South Africa’s national pass rate for the 2024 National Senior Certificate has therefore increased from 82.9% in 2023 to 87.3%,” Gwarube said.
However, the DBE’s stats only reflect how many students who physically wrote the exams achieved a pass.
It doesn’t reflect the number of learners who dropped out of school before matric or those who dropped out between enrolling at the start of the year and sitting the exams at the end of the year.
Special interest organisations such as Equal Education and the Zero Dropout Campaign use different metrics to calculate what they regard as the country’s “real” matric pass rates.
For example, Equal Education calculates its rate by comparing how many learners of the last matric year passed their examinations as a proportion of Grade 2 enrolments.
It prefers to use Grade 2 rather than Grade 1 as there is generally a disproportionately high number of students held back after their first year of schooling.
Other organisations like the Democratic Alliance determine their rate as a proportion of Grade 10 enrolments. This is because school students can exit the basic education system after Grade 9.
It is assumed that those who enrol for Grade 10 have ambitions to complete matric.
When taking into account that 1,101,320 learners were enrolled in Grade 10 in 2022, the “true” pass rate when factoring dropout rates into the equation would be 55.9%.
This is a slight improvement over the 53.0% recorded in 2023.
When calculating the “true” pass rate using Equal Education’s approach of considering Grade 2 enrolments, the figure remains at 55.9% — slightly higher than the 51.3% calculated using this method in 2023.
Another method of calculating the “real” pass rate is to take Grade 8 enrolments from 2020, which produces a pass rate of 58.2%. In 2023, that rate was 54.2%.
All not lost for dropouts
The minister said that the big difference between the enrolled cohorts and the number of students who wrote the final matric exams doesn’t necessarily mean all of these learners dropped out of school.
“Firstly, learners have a choice after Grade 9 to switch to Technical and Vocational Education and Training colleges and indeed a number of them do so,” said Gwarube.
“Secondly, different learners at different times progress to different grades, with some moving to become part-time candidates and some changing their subjects.”
Another way to measure the pass rate is to use the number of Grade 12 learners who enrolled at the beginning of 2024 as the total figure, rather than the number who wrote the exams.
Based on the cohort of 724,156 students who enrolled in Grade 12 in 2024, 615,429 passed the matric exams. This works out to a pass rate of 85%.
The table below shows the “real” matric pass rate based on learner throughput from the Grade 2, Grade 8, and Grade 10 enrollments of 2024’s matric learners.
Cohort | Enrolled | Percentage that passed the matric exams |
---|---|---|
Grade 2 cohort (2014) | 1,100,342 | 55.9% |
Grade 8 cohort (2020) | 1,058,068 | 58.2% |
Grade 10 cohort (2022) | 1,101,320 | 55.9% |