PRETORIA — The Department of Basic Education (DBE) says the 2025 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results will be published in accredited newspapers on Tuesday, 13 January 2026, using the same pseudonymised format applied in recent years — examination numbers and results only, with no learner names or ID numbers.  

The DBE says it believes it is legally obliged to continue publishing the results in this format, pointing to a court order granted on 18 January 2022, which remains in force.  

The move comes amid an ongoing legal and policy tug-of-war with the Information Regulator, which has challenged the publication of results on privacy grounds under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). In late 2024, the Regulator issued an enforcement notice instructing the DBE not to publish results in newspapers, and later confirmed steps to enforce that position — including a proposed administrative fine.  

However, according to recent reporting, a full bench of the Pretoria High Court ruled in December 2025 that matric results may be published on public platforms in the exam-number format used since 2022 — a decision the Information Regulator has indicated it wants to appeal, while the DBE says it will oppose that appeal process.  

So when did the “newspaper results” tradition start — and did it ever stop?

Publishing matric results in newspapers has been a long-running practice in South Africa, mainly because it offered a fast, accessible way for families to check results — especially before widespread internet access. There isn’t one single “official start date” published by government, but the practice is widely described as long-established and has been treated by DBE and the courts as a long-standing, public method of access.  

What did change — and what nearly “stopped” — is how results are published:

• The DBE tried to stop publication (or restrict it) as privacy concerns sharpened under POPIA, especially from 2024 onward.

• It didn’t stop because the courts allowed publication to continue, but only in a pseudonymised way (exam numbers, not names), and those rulings are still shaping what happens now.  

-The VIP Team 

-DBE

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