SA education: the bill is due
South Africa spends more on education than on anything else. According to National Treasury, education claims 23.2% of consolidated expenditure over the medium term: the single largest share of the budget. And yet, at every stage of the pipeline, the system fails the young South Africans it is supposed to serve.
Funding is not the problem; ideology, accountability, management and performance are.
Start at the beginning. Only 63% of the Grade 1 class of 2014 reached Grade 12 in 2025 without repeating a year or dropping out. In other words, more than a third of children who enter the system do not complete it on time. Meanwhile, about 60% of children aged 0-4 attend no early learning programme at all. This means the foundation is broken before formal schooling even begins.
For those who do reach matric, of the more than 746,000 candidates who wrote their Grade 12 exams in 2025, just 46.4% obtained a bachelor’s pass – the minimum for university entry. In mathematics, only 1.9% of candidates achieved a distinction (80%+). In a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven competition, South Africa is producing a generation that is largely locked out of the skills economy before it has even entered the workforce.
The rot at school level flows directly into the tertiary system. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme is beset by funding shortfalls, administrative dysfunction, and corruption allegations. Public universities are increasingly reliant on tuition fees to fill the gap, pushing the cost of education beyond the reach of the households that can least afford it. The government’s own target of 1.18 million public university students by 2030 has already been acknowledged by the higher education minister as insufficient to meet National Development Plan objectives.
The consequences are visible in the labour market. The official youth unemployment for those aged 15 to 24 stood at 62.2% in 2025, up from 60.7% two years earlier. For those aged 25 to 34, it was 40.5%, up from 39.8%. These are not rounding errors. They represent millions of young people suspended between a system that has failed to equip them and an economy that has no use for them. South Africa’s talent competitiveness ranking tells the same story from a different angle: 62nd out of 69 countries in the IMD’s 2025 World Talent Ranking, with a score of 36.09 against Switzerland’s 100.
The 11.8 percentage-point gap in maths distinction rates between black and white candidates maps almost perfectly onto infrastructure deficits. Over 15,000 out of some 22,000 public schools lack a laboratory. More than 11,000 have no computer facility. In Limpopo, 60% of public schools have no library. These are not statistics about educational philosophy; they are statistics about neglect.
The proposed shift toward an “Afro-centric” history curriculum, while the mathematics and science portfolios remain in crisis, speaks to misplaced priorities. A child who cannot read or calculate will not be liberated by a revised history syllabus.
South Africa is not failing for lack of money. It is failing because the money is not translating into outcomes – and because the political will to confront the structural causes of that failure, including teacher accountability, labour-union capture of the public education system, and the chronic underfunding of early childhood development, remains elusive.
The bill for three decades of educational underperformance is now due. It shows up in youth unemployment queues, in the legions of those not in employment, education or training, and in a workforce that cannot support the dependents accumulating around it. The private sector has a role to play – in low-fee independent schooling, in Technical and Vocational Education and Training partnerships, in early childhood investment – but it cannot substitute for a state that does not take seriously its foundational obligation to provide fit-for-purpose, quality education.
