Data sources and methodology

All school listings come from the Department of Basic Education (DBE) school masterlist, published through its Education Management Information System (EMIS). The current edition is DBE EMIS School Masterlist, Quarter 3 of 2025, which lists 25 527 ordinary public, independent and special needs schools.

What each field means

• Level is simplified from the DBE phase: primary (including intermediate schools), high (secondary), combined, special needs (including schools of skills and hospital schools) and pre-school.
• Public or private: the DBE's “independent” sector is shown as private.
• Quintile is the national poverty ranking for public schools, from 1 (poorest) to 5. See quintiles explained.
• Learners and educators are the counts the DBE published for 2025.
• Location: the DBE's GPS coordinates, used for maps and distances.

How we clean the data

• Names and addresses are converted from capitals to normal case. Text that was garbled by a character-encoding error in the source (for example in Afrikaans school names) is repaired.
• Coordinates that were stored in swapped columns are corrected, and points outside South Africa are removed.
• Placeholder codes such as “99” or “to be updated” are left blank.
• Towns are taken from the town/city field, or from the suburb, village or municipality when the town is missing.

Personal information

The masterlist includes the names and personal email addresses of some principals. We do not publish these. We show the school's telephone number as published by the department. If a number shown is a personal number and should be removed, tell us and we will remove it.

Corrections

If a school's details are wrong, use update a school listing. We check changes against official sources before publishing them.