Schools in South Africa

How many schools are in South Africa?

There are 25,527 registered schools in South Africa, teaching 13,765,085 learners and employing 482,423 educators. They sit across 9 provinces, 76 education districts and 7,272 towns and suburbs. The three largest provinces by school count are KwaZulu-Natal (6,098), Eastern Cape (5,281) and Limpopo (3,854).

Counts come from the Department of Basic Education's EMIS register (Q3 2025), which lists ordinary public and independent schools. EMIS is refreshed annually, so a school that opened or closed recently may not appear yet.

How many learners and teachers are there?

South Africa's schools enrol 13,765,085 learners and employ 482,423 educators — an average of 28.5 learners per educator nationally.

That ratio is not class size. It divides all learners at a school by all educators on its staff establishment, including heads of department and specialists who teach a reduced load, so an actual classroom usually holds more learners than the ratio suggests. It is useful for comparing schools of similar type, and misleading read as a headcount.

How many schools are in each quintile?

22,215 public schools carry a quintile in EMIS. Quintile 1 serves the most economically disadvantaged communities and Quintile 5 the least. It describes a school's context, not its quality.

• Q17,35333%
• Q26,04227%
• Q35,12623%
• Q41,8118%
• Q51,8838%

Independent schools are excluded: the quintile system allocates government funding to public schools, so a legacy quintile value on an independent school is not meaningful. Quintiles shown in green are the no-fee band.

How many no-fee schools are there?

18,521 public schools sit in the national no-fee band — Quintiles 1 to 3, which may not charge mandatory fees. That is 83% of quintile-ranked public schools, and they teach 74% of the learners at those schools. The two percentages differ because no-fee schools are on average smaller.

A further 993 Quintile 4 and 5 schools are recorded as no-fee, where a provincial department has extended the status beyond the national designation. Read that as approximate rather than a register. It is understated because only some provinces maintain the flag at all, and overstated because 154 of the 993 are in Mpumalanga, whose recorded quintiles disagree with the Department's own 2026 determination on about half of the schools we can check. The no-fee status of those schools comes straight from that determination and is sound; it is the quintile beside it that is not.

No-fee status does not mean no costs — uniforms, transport and trips are still paid by families, and a school may ask for voluntary contributions. How school quintiles work explains the funding behind the classification, and the school finder filters by quintile and fee status near an address.