We publish reference datasets on South African schooling: the numbers we needed ourselves, cleaned up, documented and given away. Everything here is free to download, quote and republish under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. Journalists, researchers and school leaders are all welcome to use it.
Studies
The State of South African Classrooms 2025
Published 2 September 2026
Learners, educators and class sizes in all 22,257 public ordinary schools, by province, quintile, phase and district. Includes the full dataset as CSV and JSON.
Read the studyHow we work
- Public sources only. Everything is built from records anyone can download, so any figure we publish can be checked against the original.
- Every number comes from a script. No hand-typed figures. The scripts that produce each table are named on the study page, and re-running them against a newer release refreshes the tables.
- We say what the data cannot support. Official datasets have gaps and quirks. Where a column looks like it supports a striking claim but does not, we say so on the page rather than publishing the claim.
Working on a story?
If you need a cut of the data we have not published — a single district, a different grouping, an earlier year — ask and we will put it together. Email info@myencore.co.za.