The SA school curriculum isn’t broken, the conditions are — and we’ve designed it that way

When the 2025 matric results were announced on 12 January 2026, the pattern was predictable. The Independent Examinations Board (IEB) achieved a 98.31% pass rate, with 89.12% of candidates qualifying for bachelor’s degree study. The Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) National Senior Certificate results: 88% pass rate.

Same curriculum. Wildly different outcomes.

When I was head of the foundation phase at an independent school, parents would regularly ask: “Do you follow CAPS or IEB?”

There is no IEB curriculum. Not until Grade 10. Every school in South Africa – public, private, prestigious, struggling – teaches the same Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) from Grade R to Grade 9. By law. The IEB is an examination board, not a curriculum. Their own website states that they base their assessments on CAPS. Umalusi confirms that universities cannot distinguish between IEB and DBE certificates.

Same curriculum. Same certificate. So, what exactly are parents paying for?

What the research actually shows

A 2019 study from UCT’s Development Policy Research Unit found that IEB pupils perform better at university – between 1.6 and 6.5 percentage points higher in first-year GPA. But when researchers decomposed this advantage into a “teaching effect” versus a “testing effect” they found something remarkable.

“The majority of the impact of the IEB comes simply from the different exam, and that teaching effects are minimal.”

It’s not the teaching; it’s the assessment style. IEB exams demand application, synthesis and transfer of knowledge. Pupils drilled on those question types develop those cognitive habits.

Elegant plans, sophisticated systems, billions spent on measuring failure – while the foundation crumbles.

The study also found that “the IEB effect seems to be independent of resource availability, and that simply the exposure to the alternative testing method is sufficient for students to see significant improvements”.

We’ve known for years what produces better outcomes. Assessment that demands thinking, not recall. A good, confident and supported teacher can make magic happen in a CAPS classroom. But the inverse is also true – and the inverse is South Africa’s reality.

So, why hasn’t the Department of Basic Education adopted these approaches nationally?

The choice not to act

The department has spent years perfecting tools to measure failure while starving the conditions that produce success. We know what works. We choose not to fund it.

Mass teacher shortages. Crumbling infrastructure for training. Class sizes that reduce teaching to crowd control. A system that responds to crises with more measurement rather than intervention.

If assessment style matters this much, the DBE could pilot IEB-style questioning in well-resourced public schools tomorrow. Start small. Measure what happens. Scale what works. They don’t.

Instead, as 2025 matric results were about to be announced, the department was managing an exam breach scandal. Two DBE officials had leaked exam papers affecting 40 pupils. The breach wasn’t an anomaly – it was a predictable outcome of a system that puts impossible pressure on schools while providing impossible conditions.

What IEB schools sell are conditions. Class sizes of 20 instead of 45. Teachers with time to plan beyond drill-and-recall.

The pattern repeats. In December 2025, while preparing to celebrate pass rates, the Gauteng Department of Education announced 4,858 Grade 1 and Grade 8 pupils still had no school placement. Their response? “It’s not our mandate to build schools.”

Over three years, the DBE spent R7.1-billion on ICT infrastructure. Meanwhile, children had no classrooms to sit in.

This is strategy without response. Elegant plans, sophisticated systems, billions spent on measuring failure – while the foundation crumbles.

What private schools actually sell

Let’s be honest about what IEB schools offer.

It’s not a different curriculum – that’s identical for 10 years. It’s not necessarily better teaching – the research found teaching effects were minimal.

What they sell are conditions. Class sizes of 20 instead of 45. Teachers with time to plan beyond drill-and-recall. Professional development that builds confidence. Networks of alumni and connected parents that convert to internships and opportunities.

They sell the conditions that make good teaching possible. And then they call it educational superiority.

IEB matriculants have a 2% university dropout rate compared with the national average of 35% to 50%. Not because they learnt different content. Because they learnt in conditions where thinking was possible, where teachers had capacity to develop them, where the system worked for them rather than despite them.

The 2025 results prove this. The 10.31 percentage point gap between IEB and DBE pass rates isn’t about curriculum – both systems have taught CAPS for 10 years. It’s about what happens when you have capacity versus when you don’t.

Every parent who can afford the exit takes it. Who can blame them? But, there is a cost attached to that exit.

Extraction economics

When families with resources leave the public system, they take more than school fees. They take volunteer hours, advocacy, social capital and the expectation that things should work.

This is extraction economics applied to education – mining communities for their most resourced families while leaving behind depleted capacity. The opposite of stewardship, which would ask: how do we tend the whole system so all children flourish?

A system producing predictable failure for predictable populations is not broken. It is working. Say it plainly.

What remains is a system with less pressure, less capacity and less hope. Teachers demoralised by impossible conditions. Parents too consumed by survival to organise. Students who learn, year after year, that they are worth less investment than children in other postal codes.

The gap widens. The narrative reinforces itself. “IEB is better” becomes common knowledge, unexamined. The cycle continues.

This isn’t policy failure. It’s design.

The question no one asks

CAPS is fit for purpose. That’s the problem.

The question is: whose purpose? And when did we agree to it?

A system that produces predictable failure for predictable populations is not broken. It is functioning. Until we acknowledge that current outcomes are features rather than bugs, we will keep “reforming” around the edges while the architecture remains intact.

The 2025 matric results – 98.31% for IEB, 88% for DBE – tell us everything we need to know. Same curriculum. Different conditions. Predictable outcomes.

We can continue to pretend the curriculum is the problem. We can keep measuring failure with more sophisticated tools. We can celebrate 88% pass rates while 5,464 children have no schools.

Or we can name what the evidence shows: CAPS works when you invest in conditions. It fails when you don’t. The system knows this. We all know this.

The code we carry

We tell ourselves apartheid ended 30 years ago. We point to the constitution, the elections, the peaceful transition.

But systems don’t die when you sign documents. They embed. They become part of the machinery. The cell doesn’t recognise the invasion because the invasion is the cell now. And every time conditions favour replication, new variants emerge.

Exit over voice. Network access sold as merit. Resource hoarding disguised as school choice. The quiet extraction of capacity from communities that can least afford to lose it. The collective agreement not to see what we’re choosing.

The DBE has enough data on failure. Redirect resources from measurement towards conditions that produce outcomes.

The rook, in chess, doesn’t need to move to control the board. It controls by existing. By defining what lines of movement are possible. By making certain futures unthinkable for certain children based on which postcode they were born into.

Every parent who exits, every teacher who transfers to better conditions, every citizen who shrugs and says “that’s just how it is” – we are all participants. We are all choosing extraction over stewardship. Taking what we can for our own rather than tending what belongs to all of us.

Extraction is the logic of apartheid. Stewardship is the logic of Ubuntu. Thirty years later, we’re still running the wrong code.

A different choice

The call to action is not complicated.

Acknowledge reality. CAPS is not the problem. Implementation conditions are. IEB schools prove that South African children can thrive academically – given resources, class sizes and teacher support that make learning possible.

Stop building thermometers. The DBE has enough data on failure. Redirect resources from measurement towards conditions that produce outcomes: teacher training, manageable class sizes, infrastructure that functions.

Name the design. A system producing predictable failure for predictable populations is not broken. It is working. Say it plainly.

Choose stewardship over extraction. This is the hardest one. It asks those with resources to stay and fight rather than leave and thrive. It asks us to tie our children’s futures to other people’s children. It asks us to believe that tending the whole produces better outcomes than mining the parts.

I don’t know if we’re capable of this. The 2025 matric results – IEB celebrating 98.31% while DBE manages scandals and unplaced pupils – suggest we prefer the exit.

But every year we delay, another cohort of children learns they are worth less. Another generation inherits the code. Another cycle of extraction completes itself.

The harvest matches the seeds. It always has. The question is whether we’re ready to plant something different. DM

Esmè van Deventer is an educational anthropologist and founder of the Azimuth Educational Innovation Consultancy. She led foundation-phase education at South Africa’s first virtual reality school and hosts The Bell Rebellion podcast.