Matric results are not the future

The most important educational outcome is not mastery of content but to continue learning and actualising it in unfamiliar contexts

- Kat Yassim

As is the case every year, matric pass rates will be analysed, provinces compared, schools ranked and top students will be held up as symbols of progress.

(Gallo Images)

As South Africa prepares to release the 2026 matric results this month, the country will once again gather around a familiar set of numbers. Pass rates will be analysed, provinces compared, schools ranked and a handful of top achievers held up as symbols of progress. But behind these statistics are young people whose lives will unfold in ways the results cannot predict or prepare them for.

For example, there would be a learner who passes matric with excellent results and enters university confident, only to discover that she struggles to cope at university when there is no clear instruction, no memorandum, and no “right” answer.

Group work would feel foreign, and independent thinking risky. When learning becomes ambiguous, she falters, not because she lacks ability, but because schooling trained her to perform, not to practise learning.

Then there might be a learner who does not pass matric but who spent years repairing phones, helping run a family business, navigating customers, money, and problem-solving daily. She learned through doing, failing and adapting, yet the system tells her she is deficient and offers her a few structured ways to turn competence into recognised opportunity.

And then, finally, there might be a learner who achieves distinctions under extraordinary conditions, only to be confronted by an economy unable to absorb her because credentials matter less than networks, adaptability, and the capacity to keep learning as work itself changes. In reality, these are not individual failures; these are systemic outcomes.