South African families are increasingly turning to tutoring not only to help learners who are falling behind, but also to strengthen the performance of high-achieving pupils facing growing competition for university places.
The shift is highlighted by Teach Me 2, which says demand for personalised academic support has expanded significantly as families navigate a more competitive education landscape.
Nick Miller, who is the founder and CEO of Teach Me 2, has seen that change through the platform’s growth.
From 4 400 lessons in its first year, the service delivered a record 115 000 lessons last year, with more than 10 000 families currently using the platform. Collectively, learners have spent more than one million hours studying through Teach Me 2.
The profile of learners seeking additional academic support is also changing.
Miller says tutoring now attracts learners across the academic spectrum, from pupils addressing foundational gaps to high performers trying to secure admission to competitive university programmes.
‘At one end, we encounter learners who have significant foundational gaps. At the other end of the spectrum, some of our strongest learners use tutors. They’re not struggling at all, but may be preparing for a competitive degree, looking to master the hardest questions in an exam or to preserve as many options as possible for university.’
He points to Mathematics as a particularly important example, where a relatively small improvement in marks can affect a learner’s eligibility for sought-after fields of study.
Mathematics accounts for four out of every 10 tutoring hours on the Teach Me 2 platform, with four times as many Mathematics lessons delivered as English lessons, the second most requested subject.
The demand comes against a difficult backdrop for Mathematics achievement.
While South Africa’s overall Matric pass rate has risen, the number of learners achieving distinctions in Mathematics and Physical Science declined in 2025.
The report states that just 4 897 of 253 368 potential Mathematics distinctions were achieved, equivalent to 1.9%, compared with 3.9% the previous year.
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The pressure extends beyond individual subjects, as more than 700 000 Matrics qualified for some form of tertiary study last year, while public universities were expected to turn away more than 500 000 applicants in 2026 because of limited capacity.
Figures cited in the release illustrate the scale of demand at some of the country’s major universities.
The University of Cape Town received almost 99 000 applications for about 4 500 places, while the University of the Witwatersrand received around 86 000 applications for 6 000 places.
Stellenbosch University recorded about 90 000 applications for 6 005 places.
Miller says this is contributing to a more deliberate approach among parents and learners.
‘Learners aren’t only trying to get a good education. They may have specific goals that define academic success for them. For that reason, many very strong students use tutoring precisely because they’re ambitious.’
The growing interest in tutoring also comes as personalised learning receives greater attention, including through the emergence of artificial intelligence-based educational tools.
Miller argues that traditional classrooms inevitably have limitations when one teacher must deliver a curriculum to a group of learners progressing at different speeds.
‘A classroom is necessarily a fairly blunt instrument to deliver mass education,’ he says. ‘A teacher has a curriculum to cover in a specific timeframe and a group of learners who are all progressing at different speeds.’
Individual tutoring, by contrast, can allow a learner to revisit a particular concept, identify a gap and spend additional time on it rather than moving forward with the rest of the class.
The changing tutoring market also reflects broader choices families are making about education.
The latest BrandMapp survey cited by Teach Me 2 found that 27% of parents in households earning more than R10 000 a month are concerned about the quality of their children’s education, whether those children attend public or private schools.
The release puts the number of parents represented by this proportion at about 2.3 million.
Miller cautions against interpreting demand for tutoring as evidence that schools are failing.
‘Schools have an incredibly difficult job,’ he says. ‘Even an excellent school and an excellent teacher cannot consistently provide every learner with completely individualised instruction.’
He argues that tutoring can instead address a structural limitation of mass education by providing additional individual attention where a classroom cannot always do so.
For families, that supplementary layer may include private tutoring, homeschooling, smaller classes, online learning or alternative curricula.
Some parents are also making education decisions around longer-term objectives, including admission to overseas universities.
Perhaps the more fundamental issue raised by the tutoring trend is not simply whether learners understand their schoolwork, but whether they have developed effective ways of learning.
Miller believes this distinction is frequently overlooked.
‘We fundamentally misdiagnose why many learners struggle. We assume it’s an understanding problem, when very often it’s a behavioural problem. The bigger problem is that many learners have never been taught how to learn, and don’t have an awareness of how they learn.’
That places tutoring within a broader conversation about study habits, independence and academic confidence rather than marks alone.
‘We spend an enormous amount of time teaching children what to learn. I don’t think we spend nearly enough time teaching them how to learn,’ Miller says.
He adds that the longer-term objective should extend beyond the next examination.
‘The goal is not just a learner who can pass the next exam, but someone who knows how to learn independently for the rest of their life.’
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