Matric results battle heads to Supreme Court of Appeal

South Africa’s long-running fight over whether matric results should appear in newspapers is heading into another legal chapter, with the Information Regulator now taking its challenge to the Supreme Court of Appeal.

The dispute has been running for years, but at its heart is a relatively simple question: can learners’ results be made publicly available if their names are removed and replaced with examination numbers?

That question has already produced several court battles, with AfriForum and other parties supporting the continued publication of results while the Information Regulator has argued that the practice can still expose learners’ personal information.

The issue became particularly complicated after the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) came fully into effect. Before the changes, newspapers published matriculants’ names alongside their results. The Department of Basic Education subsequently moved away from publishing names and instead used examination numbers.

According to Business Tech, the department has argued that the numbers provide enough protection because a newspaper reader cannot reasonably identify an individual learner simply from an examination number.

The Information Regulator has taken a different view.

Its concern is that the numbers are not necessarily anonymous in practice. The regulator has argued that examination numbers are allocated sequentially and that learners who wrote examinations together could potentially use that sequence to work out which result belongs to another learner.

That disagreement became a major point in the legal proceedings.

In 2024, the regulator issued an enforcement notice seeking to prevent the publication of matric results in newspapers and instead have them made available through alternatives such as schools and the Department of Basic Education’s secure SMS platform.

The department did not follow that instruction and continued publishing results using examination numbers.

A full bench of the Gauteng High Court later ruled in December 2025 that matric results could be published publicly using examination numbers, finding that this approach provided sufficient protection for learners’ privacy. The court also set aside the regulator’s notices against the department.

The regulator then tried to take the matter further, but its application for leave to appeal was rejected by the High Court in June 2026. The court found that the regulator had not shown a reasonable prospect of success or another compelling reason for an appeal.

That did not end the matter.

The Information Regulator subsequently approached the Supreme Court of Appeal directly, seeking permission to continue the legal challenge. The case has broader implications because it is not simply about the annual publication of matric marks; it also tests how POPIA applies when information is presented using numbers or codes rather than names.

AfriForum has opposed the regulator’s challenge, arguing that the court’s decision strikes an important balance between privacy and the public interest. The organisation has also argued that the outcome could have implications for research and other areas where people are identified through codes rather than their names.

For now, the legal battle means the familiar practice of seeing matric results published without learners’ names remains tied to an increasingly significant question about privacy in South Africa.

The Supreme Court of Appeal’s involvement could ultimately determine whether examination numbers are enough to protect matriculants’ identities under POPIA, or whether the publication of results in this format goes too far.

Either way, the outcome will reach beyond the newspapers themselves. It could help define how South African institutions are allowed to make information publicly available when the people behind that information can potentially be identified through supposedly anonymous numbers.

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**Picture: **ER Lombard / Gallo Images

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