Four filters change the shortlist. The rest are refinement.
Phase, location, fees and school type. Start with those and the list is usually short enough to read properly. The remaining filters are for trimming a shortlist you already have, not for building one.
The pass rate filter hides every primary school.
Worth knowing before you touch it. 18,420 of the 24,987 schools in this directory have no matric pass rate recorded, which is 73.7% of them, for the straightforward reason that primary schools do not write matric. Set a minimum pass rate and every one of them drops out of the results, including the primary school you were looking for. Use that filter when you are shopping for a high school. Leave it alone the rest of the time.
About 8% of schools here have 2026 fee data.
Fees are the hardest thing in South African education to collect, mostly because schools publish them as a PDF that changes in November and vanishes from the website in February. Roughly 8% of the directory has 2026 fees recorded, weighted towards independents and the better-documented fee-paying public schools. If a school shows no fee, that is a gap in our record rather than a free school. The genuinely no-fee schools are labelled as no-fee.
Roughly 60% of the public system charges no fees at all.
That is the Quintile 1 to 3 share of public schools nationally, and it is worth saying plainly that no-fee is not a synonym for a weak school. There are no-fee schools with strong results and there are R70,000-a-year independents that quietly underperform. Look at the individual school rather than the tier it sits in. Public schools that do charge fees are also required to grant exemptions based on household income, which is a rule a surprising number of parents never hear about from the school itself.
What to ask once you have a shortlist.
Three questions, in this order. What was the Bachelor pass rate last year, not the pass rate. How long have the current teachers been at the school. And what happens, specifically, when a child starts struggling in Grade 8. The third matters most and is the one most likely to be answered with a sentence about a wonderful support structure. Push for the specifics.
If you are still working out what the badge on the blazer means, the curriculum guide covers NSC, IEB and Cambridge, and the feeder zone guide explains why the school four streets away may still not take your child. Fees for the schools we hold data on are in the fee comparison table.
