GOOD Statement by *Brett Herron,
Unite for Change Leadership Council Member and GOOD Secretary-General
12 January 2026
Congratulations to the Matric class of 2025. You have completed a long journey, often in difficult circumstances at home, in your community or at school, putting in the hard work and demonstrating the resilience to reach an important milestone.
Our congratulations also go to the educators, a generally under-acknowledged cohort in South African society. In underdeveloped and under-resourced communities across the country, teachers fulfil critical roles beyond teaching, serving as role models and leaders.
Together, our learners and educators have achieved a better set of Matric results than in the previous year, continuing an upward trend. Should the trend continue, we will soon be approaching the mythical 100% pass rate.
Of course, if you add in all the learners who would have written the 2025 Matric exams had they not dropped out of school, the numbers wouldn’t look as impressive – and there are also issues of the quality of education to consider. Neither learners nor educators are primarily responsible for these factors; they are a consequence of the education system, managed and implemented by politicians and government officials.
Whereas they want South Africans to believe the annual Matric results are a measure of the quality of the education system they run, their quality is better measured by how many Matriculants have acquired the kind of skills to go on to land meaningful jobs. The paltry economic growth rate doesn’t inhibit the creation of livelihoods on its own. We should ask, for instance, why much of the entrepreneurial territory in the informal economy is dominated by migrants and refugees? Where are the local skills, drive and initiative?
The truth is that, as in many other areas of society, we haven’t done enough to address the legacy of the deliberately unequal education system we inherited. Whereas the Education Department does its best each year to highlight an under-resourced school or two that have managed to defy the odds and produce brilliant results, the overall pattern of inequality remains overwhelmingly prevalent.
If we could fix the education system, we could begin to meaningfully tackle misogyny and apply the brakes on runaway GBV… we could begin to meaningfully tackle social integration… we could begin to meaningfully tackle the gang and violent crime culture and develop common purpose and resolve.
It’s not too late. What it needs is leadership in the education sector with some imagination and courage.
We should be building short and long-term exchange programmes for learners and educators, creating academic projects and developing sports fixtures outside our traditional class and/or colour-coded comfort zones. We should reconfigure our curricula to highlight human values, vulnerabilities and inter-dependencies. We should be forcing provincial departments to spend the education’s rightful share of the budget from the National Government on education.
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