Official EMIS Data + NSC Matric Results + NEIMS/EFMS Infrastructure + Verified School-Provided Details
Last processed: 2026-08-08. School data: DBE EMIS Q3 2025. Matric results: NSC School Performance Report 2025. Subject results: NSC School Subject Reports 2024 & 2025. Infrastructure: NEIMS/EFMS 2021 (historical).
Data Source: EMIS
The core school record on SchoolSeek comes from the Education Management Information System (EMIS), maintained by the South African Department of Basic Education. The EMIS dataset includes institutional information for every registered school in South Africa — public and independent. SchoolSeek currently uses the Q3 2025 national EMIS extract, which covers 25,527 schools across all 9 provinces. A school may separately supply additional details about itself, which we verify and label as school-provided — see "School-provided information" below. This overlay is additive and never alters the official EMIS statistics.
EMIS Classification Fields
Beyond core fields like name, location, and learner count, we surface EMIS classification metadata including phase, sector, quintile, and specialisation. The specialisation field distinguishes ordinary schools (the majority), schools focused on specific subject phases (PRIMARY SUBJECTS, SECONDARY SUBJECTS), and schools serving specific learner groups (SPECIAL NEEDS EDUCATION, SCHOOL OF SKILL). Some provinces include richer SEN sub-types in this field — e.g. AUTISM, DEAF, CEREBRAL PALSIED. These are administrative classifications: they describe what kind of school it is, not how well it performs. We never use specialisation as an input to peer comparison, ranking, or any quality signal. Like all EMIS data, classification values reflect the most recent annual snapshot we have ingested. Specialisation is among the most stable EMIS fields — a school's administrative classification rarely changes between annual refreshes (reclassification is a multi-year DBE process), so values are typically reliable. Contact details, by contrast, are far more likely to drift between refreshes; please report any incorrect contact information so we can verify and update.
Learner numbers over time
A school profile shows how many learners the school reported in each year from 2007 to 2025. The figures come from the national lists of schools that the Department of Basic Education publishes, the same source as the current record. We found lists with figures for 15 of those 19 years. We found none for 2014, 2015, 2017 or 2024, and those years are shown as gaps. A school is followed from list to list by its EMIS number. Where the name on an older list is too different from the school's name today for us to be sure it is the same school, that year is left out. Nothing is estimated, averaged or filled in: a year with no figure says "Data not available". A figure is also left out when it is more than three times larger or smaller than the figures on both sides of it and those two are close to each other, which is the pattern of a recording error. That removes fewer than 100 figures across all schools and years. About 4,000 schools were listed in some earlier year as a different kind of school from today, most often a combined school that is now a primary school. A school like that usually offered a different range of grades then, so its numbers then and now may not be counting the same thing. Those years are drawn as outlined bars and named on the profile. The older lists give one school type for the whole of 2007 to 2013, as it stood in 2013. Learner numbers are not a measure of quality, and we draw no conclusion from a rise or a fall: a number can change because a school adds or drops grades, because new schools open nearby or boundaries change, or because of an error in what was reported. The older lists also carry educator counts. We do not publish those, because too many of them are plainly wrong or repeated unchanged from year to year.
Data Processing Pipeline
Raw EMIS data is processed through an automated pipeline that: (1) parses the national Excel file, (2) filters to the target province, (3) normalises inconsistent fields (urban/rural casing, no-fee status values, phone numbers), (4) validates GIS coordinates against South Africa's geographic bounds, (5) replaces sentinel values (99, None) with explicit null markers, and (6) generates URL-safe slugs for every school and area. The pipeline runs comprehensive validation tests after every execution.
Learner-Educator Ratio Methodology
Schools are grouped into peer groups based on three dimensions: quintile (or independent status), phase (primary, secondary, combined), and province. Within each peer group, we calculate the percentile rank for the learner-to-educator ratio. A school with a "lower L:E ratio than 80% of similar schools" has a more favourable ratio than 80% of schools in its peer group. Important: the EMIS "educators" count includes all staff classified as educators — principals, deputy principals, heads of department, and specialist staff — not just classroom teachers. The L:E ratio is therefore a staffing indicator, not a direct measure of class size. Actual class sizes are typically higher than the L:E ratio suggests. Schools with missing data receive no percentile. Peer groups with fewer than 5 schools are flagged as having limited comparison value.
Matric Peer Comparison
A school's pass rate is compared with schools in the same quintile and province, for the newest exam year only. We state how many of those schools scored lower. Where none scored higher and others matched the school, we say that too. Some public school pages also carry a dated line: in both of the last two exam years, no more than 1 in 5 public schools in the same quintile and province, with at least 30 writers in both years, had a higher pass rate. The line needs at least 20 such schools in the group and is recalculated each year, so a school can lose it. It covers exam passes only. It does not measure teaching, and it does not show how many learners left before Grade 12.
How We Calculate Distance to Major Centres
Distances are road distances, routed over OpenStreetMap road geometry using Valhalla, an open-source routing engine we run ourselves — not straight-line "as the crow flies" distances. This matters more than it sounds: measured across 60,730 school-to-centre pairs in KwaZulu-Natal, the road distance is a median of 1.4 times the straight-line distance, and at the 90th percentile it is 1.7 times. A school shown as 10 km from a city centre in straight-line terms is typically about 14 km by road, and occasionally much further where a bay, river or mountain forces a detour. We route 99.5% of school-to-centre pairs successfully; the remaining 0.5% fall back to straight-line distance and are labelled "straight-line" on the page so the two are never mixed silently. Driving times are estimates in free-flowing traffic. Our routing does not model congestion, roadworks or time of day, so a real school-run journey will usually take longer than the figure shown — treat it as a floor, not a prediction. We show the nearest centres only. Centres beyond 80 km by road are not published, because a commute at that distance is not one families are realistically weighing, and carrying the data would slow the page down for everyone on a phone. Distance is a logistical fact, not a quality signal: being near a city centre says nothing about how good a school is, and we never rank or score schools by it.
Data Exclusions and Overrides
To ensure meaningful comparisons, we apply several data quality measures: (1) Schools with fewer than 5 enrolled learners are excluded from learner-educator ratio percentile calculations. These are typically newly registered, not yet operational, or special-purpose schools where a ratio like "0.5:1" would be statistically meaningless and would skew peer group distributions. These schools still have profiles on SchoolSeek — they simply show "comparison not available" with an explanation. (2) We maintain a manual overrides file to correct known EMIS data errors (such as incorrect suburb fields, changed phone numbers, or other contact details). All overrides are documented with the original value, the correction, and the reason. (3) Area-to-district assignment uses majority voting — when schools in the same suburb span multiple education districts (due to EMIS data errors or boundary edge cases), the area is assigned to the district containing the majority of its schools. This prevents a single misclassified school from placing an entire area in the wrong district. Both the exclusion threshold and all overrides are documented and available on request.
EMIS data freshness and user-reported corrections
The Department of Basic Education refreshes EMIS once per year. Between refreshes, school details — particularly contact information like phone numbers and email addresses — can become outdated. Schools rarely submit interim corrections to EMIS, so a number on EMIS may continue to point to a disconnected line for many months after a school has changed it. We address this in two ways. First, we cross-reference school contact details against secondary sources (school websites, Facebook pages, recent news coverage, and direct school communication) when discrepancies are flagged. Second, we accept and apply user-reported corrections — but only when corroborated by at least one credible secondary source (such as the school's own Facebook page, an official school communication, or direct confirmation from school leadership). Every applied correction is logged in our public overrides file with the reporting source, the corroboration, and the date applied. We never apply a correction based on a single anonymous report without independent verification. Removing a number is the one exception: when the person who holds a listed phone number tells us it is theirs and not the school's, we take it off the page on that report, because leaving it up does them harm, and we publish a replacement only once the school confirms it. We never alter peer-comparison or matric data through this channel — overrides are scoped to factual contact and location fields only. If you spot incorrect information on a school profile, please email us with the correction and any supporting evidence; we will verify and update.
School-provided information
Beyond the official EMIS record, a school may ask us to add or correct details about itself — contact numbers, website and social links, fees, curriculum, languages of instruction, subjects, facilities such as aftercare and boarding, admissions information, a short description, and answers to common questions. Every submission is reviewed by a person before it is published. Where the school already has a contact address on record, we confirm the request through that address. Where it does not, we email the address the submitter gave us to confirm they can receive mail there, and a person decides at publication whether to trust it. Verified school-provided details then appear on that school's profile, each clearly labelled "Provided by the school · not verified by SchoolSeek" and dated. This information is strictly additive: it never replaces or alters the official statistics. Matric results, learner and educator counts, the learner-educator ratio, quintile, no-fee status, phase, sector, and all peer comparisons come only from EMIS and the NSC report and cannot be changed by a school. If a school-provided detail would contradict the official record — for example, listing fees for a no-fee school, or a curriculum that disagrees with the exam body on file — our build-time checks reject it. School-provided content is also excluded from the structured data we publish for search engines; only verified facts (official statistics and a school's own confirmed contact links) are marked up.
NSC Matric Results
SchoolSeek integrates National Senior Certificate (NSC) examination results from the DBE 2025 School Performance Report (published January 2026, source: education.gov.za). This report covers all schools that participated in the 2025 NSC Examination across all 9 provinces, including public, special, and independent schools. Nationally, 6,578 schools have matric data. For each school we store: number of progressed learners, number of candidates who wrote the exam, number who achieved the NSC, and the pass rate percentage for each year (2023, 2024, and 2025). On school profiles we display the pass rate, the number of candidates who passed out of those who wrote, and a 3-year trend chart. We show candidate counts alongside pass rates because they add essential context — a 100% pass rate from 5 candidates is a very different result from 100% from 500 candidates. We do not have per-school bachelor pass rates or distinction counts — the School Performance Report only publishes overall pass/fail data at the school level. IEB and Cambridge schools do not have per-school results in the DBE report; these schools are clearly labelled as "IEB/Cambridge results not publicly available" rather than shown as having no data.
Matric Pass Rate Context
We calculate pass rate percentiles within peer groups. Public schools are grouped by quintile and province; independent schools form their own group per province, because they are fee-funded rather than quintile-funded and a quintile carried over in the source data does not make them comparable to public schools in that band. This contextual comparison is essential for impartiality — a Quintile 1 school's pass rate should be compared to other Quintile 1 schools, not to Quintile 5 schools with vastly different resources. The percentile shows what proportion of schools in the same quintile achieved a lower pass rate. For example, "higher pass rate than 75% of Q3 schools" means this school's pass rate exceeds three-quarters of Quintile 3 schools in the Western Cape. Schools are joined to matric data by EMIS number. Primary-only schools (which do not write matric) are correctly excluded.
Per-Subject NSC Results
SchoolSeek integrates per-subject NSC results from the DBE NSC School Subject Report (published each January alongside the School Performance Report, source: education.gov.za). This report covers 11 "gateway" subjects at school level: Accounting, Agricultural Sciences, Business Studies, Economics, English First Additional Language, Geography, History, Life Sciences, Mathematical Literacy, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences. For each school, subject, and exam year we store the number of candidates who wrote, the number who achieved 30% or more (the NSC subject pass mark), and the resulting percentage. We combine the 2024 and 2025 editions of the report to show up to three exam years (2023–2025); the 2024 exam year appears in both editions, which we use as an automated cross-check on our extraction. A blank in the source report means the school did not offer the subject or had too few candidates — we disclose this explicitly rather than showing a zero. As with school-level pass rates, each subject percentage is shown with candidate counts and compared only within peer groups (the same sector and province — and the same quintile for public schools — among schools offering that subject). Subjects outside these 11 are not published at school level by the DBE, and mark distributions beyond the 30% threshold are not available. IEB and Cambridge schools do not write the NSC and never carry subject results on SchoolSeek.
Infrastructure Data (NEIMS/EFMS)
SchoolSeek displays province-level school infrastructure statistics from the National Education Infrastructure Management System (NEIMS), as reported on 12 April 2021 by the Department of Basic Education. NEIMS has since been superseded by the Education Facility Management System (EFMS), but the EFMS 2023 report uses the same 2021 data snapshot — meaning the 2021 figures remain the most recent publicly available infrastructure census data. This data covers 1,457 ordinary operational public schools in the Western Cape and includes: facilities (libraries, laboratories, computer centres, sports facilities), utilities (electricity, water supply, sanitation), connectivity (internet access, landline, cell network), and security features. Important: This is historical province-level aggregate data — it shows what percentage of schools had each facility in 2021, not whether a specific school has a library or lab today. Per-school infrastructure data is not publicly available from the DBE. When per-school data becomes available (via future DBE publications or PAIA requests), we will integrate it to show facility information on individual school profiles.
What We Measure
With EMIS data and NSC results, we can report on: school name, EMIS number, phase, sector, specialisation (administrative classification — see "EMIS Classification Fields" above), quintile, no-fee status, urban/rural classification, learner count, educator count, learner-to-educator ratio, physical address, GIS coordinates, contact details, NSC matric pass rates (2023–2025), and per-subject NSC results for the 11 gateway subjects in the DBE School Subject Report. We calculate the learner-to-educator ratio and peer group percentiles for L:E ratio, pass rate, and per-subject pass rate. Note: the educator count includes all staff classified as educators by EMIS (teachers, HODs, deputy principals, principals) — the L:E ratio is a staffing indicator, not a direct measure of class size.
What We Cannot Measure
Our data does not include: bachelor pass rates or distinction counts per school (the DBE School Performance Report only publishes overall pass/fail at school level), learner progress or value-added measures, teaching quality assessments, school culture or safety, parent or learner satisfaction, extracurricular offerings, or per-school infrastructure details (whether a specific school has a library, lab, or computer centre — only province-level NEIMS aggregate data is publicly available). We present what we can verify from official sources and clearly label the limitations.
Impartiality Principles
SchoolSeek follows strict impartiality rules: (1) We never produce composite scores, letter grades, or star ratings — these would primarily reflect community wealth, not school quality. (2) We always compare like-with-like — a Quintile 1 school is only compared to other Quintile 1 schools. (3) We never conflate resources with quality — a school's quintile and funding level describe its context, not its effectiveness. (4) We present "Data not available" rather than hiding missing fields. (5) Before publishing any metric, we ask: "Will this cause schools serving disadvantaged communities to be perceived as inferior?"
Data Coverage and Completeness
We cross-referenced our EMIS Q3 2025 dataset against multiple external sources to verify coverage: (1) the WCED Sector Analysis 2022 (published by the World Bank), which reported 1,827 schools (1,451 public ordinary, 304 independent, 72 special needs); (2) Wikipedia's List of Secondary Schools in the Western Cape; and (3) ISASA independent school directories. Our dataset contains 1,935 schools — 108 more than the 2022 baseline, consistent with 3 years of new school registrations (particularly independent schools). Over 97% of Wikipedia-listed secondary schools were found in our data; most apparent gaps were due to Afrikaans name variants (e.g., "Bellville High" is listed as "Bellville Hoërskool" in EMIS). GIS coordinate coverage is 99.1% (1,918 of 1,935 schools). A small number of schools known by common names differ from their EMIS registration names — for example, Diocesan College appears as "Bishops" and SACS appears as "S.A. College". These mappings are documented in our overrides file. Full audit findings are published in our data repository. Western Cape school profiles additionally show a language of instruction, sourced separately from the Western Cape Government's open data portal (not from EMIS) under a CC BY licence. It is published for 1,480 of the Western Cape's 1,935 public ordinary schools; the Department of Basic Education does not release this field nationally, so its absence elsewhere reflects that no other province publishes it, not a gap in our data. We display the value exactly as the Western Cape Education Department recorded it, including abbreviated forms such as "Par: Afr/Eng" — we do not expand or interpret these values.
Data Limitations and Known Issues
The EMIS dataset has known limitations: (1) Approximately 100 of 601 Northern Cape schools are missing GIS coordinates in the EMIS source data — these schools will not appear as pins in the Map Explorer, but their profiles and list view remain fully functional. The remaining Northern Cape schools have valid coordinates and show on the map normally. (2) Approximately 25% of schools nationally have missing suburb values (we use fallback logic: suburb, then town/city, then district). (3) Some Eastern Cape schools have latitude and longitude coordinates swapped (corrected in our pipeline). (4) The Urban/Rural classification field is sourced directly from EMIS and reflects historical registration data. Some schools — particularly in metropolitan areas — may be classified as RURAL despite being in urban suburbs. This is a known EMIS data quality issue and does not reflect the current operational setting of the school. (5) A small number of schools at Quintile 4 or 5 are classified as No-Fee in the EMIS data. This can occur when schools are reclassified from lower quintiles but the no-fee status field is not updated simultaneously in the source data. Parents should verify current fee arrangements directly with the school. (6) The NoFeeSchool field and various name fields have inconsistent formatting across provinces (normalised in our pipeline). We validate all coordinates against South Africa's geographic bounds and flag outliers. The Eden and Central Karoo district name is truncated in some EMIS records — both variants are mapped to the same district in our pipeline. (5) Mpumalanga's funding-classification fields are unreliable at source. The province's no-fee column marks all 1,748 schools as fee-charging, which is not possible for a province where most schools are Quintile 1–3 and national policy makes those no-fee — we publish no no-fee status for Mpumalanga rather than a wrong one. Its quintiles were also wrong: on 30 July 2026 we corrected 261 Mpumalanga schools where the Department's own two NSC reports agreed against its EMIS extract (see the corrections log). Those schools now carry the corrected value and say so on their page. The limit worth knowing: the NSC reports only list schools that write matric, so the correction reaches roughly a third of Mpumalanga's public schools. The rest — primary schools especially — still carry the EMIS value with no second source to check it against, and given what the checkable third showed, they warrant more caution than other provinces.
Updates and Corrections
EMIS data is updated annually by the Department of Basic Education. SchoolSeek refreshes its data when new EMIS extracts are published. The "last updated" date on every page reflects when our data was last processed. If you notice an error in a school's data, please contact us — we will verify against the source EMIS data and correct our pipeline if needed.
Corrections we have made
A method nobody audits is a method nobody should trust, so we publish the errors we find in our own work rather than quietly fixing them. Every entry below changed numbers or wording that had already been published. If a figure you saw here has moved, this is where to find out why.
11 November 2026 — 3 more schools moved to the correctly spelled town
The Department of Basic Education's school list spelled three town names wrongly, "Kingwilliams Town", "Lusiksiki" and "Venetersdorp", and each misspelling had a page of its own holding one school. Those three schools now appear on the King William's Town, Lusikisiki and Ventersdorp pages, and the old page addresses lead there. Earlier the same day we had left them, because each school sits a little further from the other schools in its town than our usual limit, but each school's own record names the town it belongs to.
11 November 2026 — Wild Mountain Primary School is in Swellendam
The Department of Basic Education's school list put Wild Mountain Primary School in Stellenbosch, in the Cape Winelands, although its own street address, postal code and town are in Swellendam, and the school wrote to tell us it is in Swellendam in the Overberg. We moved it to Swellendam and the Overberg district, and removed its map position and ward, which were in Stellenbosch, because we have no correct ones to show.
11 November 2026 — 7 schools in Free State, Gauteng and Mpumalanga moved to the correctly spelled suburb
The Department of Basic Education's school list also misspells, or writes as one word or two, some suburb and town names in Free State, Gauteng and Mpumalanga, for example "Stanserton" for Standerton, "Wiitsieshoek" for Witsieshoek and "Pietretief" for Piet Retief, and each misspelling had a page of its own holding one school. We corrected the spelling for 7 schools. The 7 misspelled pages are gone, their schools now appear with the other schools in the same place, and the old page addresses lead to the right page. As before, we changed the name only, and only where the school is close to the other schools in the correctly spelled place, measured both from the nearest of them and from the middle of them all. Where a name has more than one accepted form, where two names could be different places, where the school's location is not recorded, and where the correctly spelled page is the smaller one, we left the pages as they were. In the Northern Cape and the Western Cape, none of the misspelled pages met these tests.
11 November 2026 — 14 North West schools moved to the correctly spelled suburb
The Department of Basic Education's school list also misspells some North West suburbs, for example "Potchestroom" for Potchefstroom and "Mmabato" for Mmabatho, and each misspelling had a page of its own holding one or two schools. We corrected the spelling for 14 schools. The 13 misspelled pages are gone, their schools now appear with the other schools in the same place, and the old page addresses lead to the right page. As before, we changed the suburb name only, and only where the school is close to the other schools in the correctly spelled place, measured both from the nearest of them and from the middle of them all. Where a name has more than one accepted form, including older and newer Setswana spellings, where two names could be different places, where the school's location is not recorded, and where a school sits just outside the area the other schools cover, we left the pages as they were.
11 November 2026 — 20 Eastern Cape schools moved to the correctly spelled suburb
The Department of Basic Education's school list also misspells some Eastern Cape suburbs and towns, for example "Sterkspriut" for Sterkspruit and "Berliin" for Berlin, and each misspelling had a page of its own holding one or two schools. We corrected the spelling for 20 schools. The 17 misspelled pages are gone, their schools now appear with the other schools in the same place, and the old page addresses lead to the right page. As before, we changed the suburb or town name only, and only where the school is close to the other schools in the correctly spelled place, measured both from the nearest of them and from the middle of them all. Where a name has more than one accepted form, including shortened ones such as "Mt" for Mount, where two names could be different places, and where a school sits outside the area the other schools cover, we left the pages as they were.
11 November 2026 — 23 KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo schools moved to the correctly spelled suburb
The Department of Basic Education's school list also misspells some KwaZulu-Natal suburbs, for example "Nngoma" for Nongoma and "Umalzi" for Umlazi, and each misspelling had a page of its own. We corrected the spelling for 19 KwaZulu-Natal schools, and for 4 schools in and around Thohoyandou, Limpopo, listed under "Thoyandou" or "Thogandou". The 20 old page addresses now lead to the right page. As before, we changed the suburb or town name only, and only where the school is close to the other schools in the correctly spelled place. Where a name has more than one accepted spelling, where two names could be different places, and for villages far from the town whose name they carry, we left the pages as they were.
10 November 2026 — 74 Limpopo schools moved to the correctly spelled suburb
As in Gauteng in October, the Department of Basic Education's school list spells some Limpopo suburbs and villages wrongly, for example "Burgersford" for Burgersfort and "Malumulele" for Malamulele, and each misspelling had a page of its own holding between one and four schools. We corrected the spelling for 74 schools. The 65 misspelled pages are gone, their schools now appear with the other schools in the same place, and the old page addresses lead to the right page. We changed the suburb or town name only, and only where the school's own location is close to the other schools in the correctly spelled place. Limpopo has many real villages whose names differ by one letter, so where the two names could be different places, where the right spelling was open to argument, or where the school sits far from the other schools of that name, we left the pages as they were.
19 October 2026 — a phone number removed from one school's page
The Department of Basic Education's school list gave Zibokwana Senior Secondary School, in the Eastern Cape, a cellphone number that belongs to someone with no connection to the school. That person wrote to tell us they keep receiving calls meant for the school. We have removed the number from the school's page and have not put another in its place: a replacement we heard about second-hand is not enough to publish. The page will show a phone number again once the school confirms its own. Other websites that copy the Department's list still show the old number until the Department corrects its record.
11 October 2026 — 57 Gauteng schools moved to the correctly spelled suburb
The Department of Basic Education's school list spells some Gauteng suburbs wrongly, for example "Rodepoort" for Roodepoort and "Vereniging" for Vereeniging. We build one page for each suburb from that list, so each misspelling had a page of its own holding between one and three schools, apart from the page for the correctly spelled suburb. We corrected the spelling for 57 schools. The 49 misspelled pages are gone, their schools now appear with the other schools in the same place, and the old page addresses lead to the right page. We changed the suburb or town name only; nothing else about these schools changed. Where the right spelling was open to argument, or the two forms were the English and Afrikaans names of the same place, we left the pages as they were.
30 July 2026 — 461 school quintiles corrected against the Department's own reports
A school's quintile decides which other schools it is measured against, so a wrong one means a wrong comparison. We publish the quintile recorded in the Department of Basic Education's EMIS extract. Checking that extract against two other Department publications — the NSC School Performance Report and the NSC School Subject Report, matched school by school on EMIS number — showed the two reports agreeing with each other and both disagreeing with EMIS for 461 schools. Most were in Mpumalanga (261, where EMIS reads a band or more too high) and KwaZulu-Natal (169, where it reads one band too low). We have corrected those 461 to the figure the Department's own two reports agree on, and each corrected school says so on its page. Three further disagreements were left alone because the two reports did not agree with each other, and we will not guess between them. There is no newer EMIS extract that fixes this: the file we use is identical to the one the Department currently publishes. Because quintile determines peer groups, this moved the pass-rate percentile for 2,077 schools — for most the change is a point or two as the group around them shifted, and it does not mean any school's results changed.
30 July 2026 — independent schools were compared against public schools
Matric pass-rate percentiles grouped schools by quintile and province, with no sector dimension. Quintile is a government funding classification for public schools, but around 191 independent schools carry a leftover quintile value in the official records, and 439 independent schools were therefore ranked inside public quintile bands — a fee-funded school measured against schools funded by a poverty-based government allocation. Independent schools without any quintile were pooled with public schools missing that field. We now group independent schools separately, by province. This moved percentiles for 285 independent schools, in some cases substantially: a school at a 100% pass rate that had ranked high against public schools now ranks mid-range among other independent schools, most of which also achieve near-100%. The new figure is the honest one. Public-school percentiles moved only where an independent school had previously been sitting in their group.
30 July 2026 — percentiles were shown as if comparable between schools
A percentile counts how many schools in that school's own peer group scored lower. Because each group performs differently, percentiles from different groups are not comparable — two schools that both passed every candidate can read 46 and 78 purely because one sits in a group where most peers also scored 100%. Our comparison tool nevertheless colour-coded these bars on fixed thresholds, so the first rendered grey and the second blue, implying one had done better. The bars are now a single neutral colour, each shows which peer group it came from, and where a school ties with peers at the same pass rate we say so. Sorting the directory by percentile now carries a note that the column is not a national ranking unless you filter to one quintile.
30 July 2026 — a school with no peers displayed a blank figure
One school is the only school of its kind in its province with published matric results, so there is nobody to compare it against and we correctly declined to calculate a percentile. A fault in how that "no value" was written to our data files meant the page rendered a sentence with the number missing instead of explaining the situation. It now says plainly that no peer comparison is available and why.
30 July 2026 — one page section still grouped by quintile
The "Schools serving similar communities" section on school profiles built its own list rather than using the peer group, and matched on quintile without checking sector. On independent school profiles it listed public schools and displayed a quintile that we suppress everywhere else, directly below a matric section correctly stating the school is compared against other independent schools — two contradictory statements on one page. It also described 548 public schools that have no quintile on record as "independent", which they are not. Both are fixed.
Related Guides
Figures for each group of similar schools are on the NSC results page.