Why South African boys are vanishing from schools amid a dropout crisis

The celebratory mood surrounding the 2025 matriculation results, highlighted by improvements in pass rates, masked a serious demographic concern: the worrying decline in the number of boys remaining in the schooling system compared to girls. 

South Africa’s boys are disappearing at a significantly higher rate than their female counterparts, creating an increasingly imbalanced final matric cohort. 

In 2025, girls accounted for a dominant 56% of the candidates, with boys making up just 44%, a disparity that has sent alarm bells ringing at the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and among education experts.

Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube publicly expressed her concern over this disparity, attributing the higher female participation partly to improved protection for girls, including the removal of pregnancy as a barrier to education.

Yet, she pointed to more insidious drivers for the boys’ departure, citing factors such as grade repetition and a greater susceptibility to social ills, most notably gang recruitment.

Gwarube stressed the urgent need to address this haemorrhage of young men from the system, insisting the focus must be on finding these learners and “plugging those gaps”.

However, the consensus among education experts is that this is not a simple gap to be patched with a quick fix, but a complex, deeply structural crisis.

Professor Suriamurthee Maistry, a decolonial and critical curriculum scholar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Education, acknowledged the minister’s observations but cautioned against interventions based on assumptions.

Maistry stated that the reasons provided by the minister for the high male dropout rate are “speculative or good hunches about the real causes,” and he firmly insisted that any meaningful intervention must be “based on sound empirical evidence”.

He paints a stark picture of a DBE that is “notorious for acting without a firm basis and for developing blanket or universal programmes or strategies that apply across all provinces in the same way”.

Maistry is convinced a more nuanced approach is required, arguing for “a fine-grained analysis by province and school district to identify which areas and schools are most affected, and by what, and then act at the local level. But, education alone cannot solve broader societal issues that are at play.”

At the very core of this crisis, Maistry argued, is the violent collision between rigid, often toxic, gender norms and the harsh realities of South Africa's economic landscape.

“Gender norms around masculinity place a strong emphasis on boys becoming 'men' and taking responsibility in the household, particularly financial responsibility, putting boys at a greater risk of dropping out of school to work, especially in cases of serious poverty,” he explained.

These expectations — which demand that boys be dominant, self-reliant, and emotionally stoic —create specific and dangerous vulnerabilities within the school system.

According to Maistry, factors like poverty, corporal punishment, bullying, and the idea that schooling clashes with the perception of 'true masculinity' lead boys toward risky behaviour and away from education.

He suggested that some boys may view school as incompatible with a masculine identity.

The decision for a young man to abandon his education, he noted, is rarely a solitary, individual choice.

“Many township youths are excluded from socio-economic opportunities because their communities lack resources. The lure of gang membership becomes a rational response to systemic abandonment,” Maistry observed.

He noted that boys' decisions to leave school are rarely purely individual choices; they emerge from a complex interaction where poverty makes economic survival urgent, and masculine norms then dictate how boys should respond to that urgency.

The long-term ramifications of this mass male dropout are severe, promising to ripple through the country’s economy and social fabric for generations.

A shrinking pool of young men completing Further Education and Training (FET) results in fewer candidates with matric-level literacy, numeracy, and work readiness.

This exacerbates high unemployment while simultaneously deepening skills shortages, inevitably leading to stagnant wages, a drop in national productivity, and greater inequality.

“We will begin to see a widening income gap between men and women, which might strain male-female relationships,” Maistry predicted.

“We are already witnessing the intergenerational nature of poverty. So, children raised in households with unstable male employment and income face higher risks of poor educational outcomes themselves.”

The social cost is equally alarming, manifesting in what Maistry described as “higher rates of crime, substance abuse, and social alienation”.

This view is supported by the Zero Dropout Campaign, an organisation dedicated to tackling the root causes of non-completion.

Merle Mansfield, the Campaign’s programme director, explained that pupils are often “both pushed and pulled from school by multiple factors”.

The 'push' factors are typically school-based, including poor academic performance, disciplinary issues, and a palpable lack of resources. 

Mansfield noted the Campaign’s research has repeatedly found that grade repetition is a “particularly prevalent issue for boys as they get older,” often leading to cycles of “discouragement, and ultimately dropout”.

She also highlighted the disproportionate role of disciplinary action against male pupils. 

“Boys are more likely to be reported for misbehaviour than girls, and that disciplinary action... is more likely to be corporal punishment and removal from the classroom, which jeopardises their academic engagement and performance,” she revealed.

Furthermore, the ‘pull’ factors, such as gang membership and substance abuse, are often tragically intertwined, with the Campaign's 2024 national survey finding that “drug abuse had contributed to at least 9% of dropout instances”.

The Zero Dropout Campaign has been working with the DBE to develop solutions, prioritising Early Warning Systems and psychosocial support — a strategy they argue must be central to any effective prevention plan.

Their new report, School Dropout: Hanging by a Thread, launched in January 2026, warns that dropout is the “cumulative result of unmet psychosocial needs, including poverty, violence, poor mental health, weak social support, bullying, and unsafe school environments”.

“Adolescence is both a period of heightened risk and a ‘second window of opportunity’, when the right support can still reverse earlier adversity, so strengthening mental health and other support is thus essential to safeguarding overall psychosocial wellbeing,” Mansfield noted.

Yet, the current reality is grim, with South Africa having an estimated ratio of only one social worker for every 23,000 learners, leaving schools reliant on often-untrained teachers to be the first line of support.

Professor Nicky Roberts, director of Kelello Consulting and extraordinary associate professor at the University of Stellenbosch, confirmed that the lower performance of boys is evident “from very early on…right from Grade 3”.

While acknowledging that it is a global trend for boys' performance to lag, she feared the trend in South Africa is “more extreme, and very worrying”.

Roberts suggested that the current schooling environment may be structurally biased in favour of girls.

“Schooling is thought to be more girl-friendly in its expectations: sit still, keep quiet, comply with structure,” she said, adding that, “Boys seem less able to comply with the school expectations and tend to be more disruptive in class, a sign of frustration.”

Her consulting firm has recommended trialling interventions that focus on making the school environment more “boy-friendly”, including having “more men in the teaching profession, more frequent breaks which allow for physical activity, ensuring time is given for eating and then for playing, shorter lessons, and potentially separating boys from girls in different classes in high school.”

She even suggested considering “different school entry age requirements for boys”, allowing them to start school six months later to potentially “reduce their early disadvantage”.

Education expert Professor Labby Ramrathan from the University of KwaZulu-Natal echoed the concerns about curriculum and masculinity as critical determinants.

He identified three key drivers of dropout: economic pressure, the struggle to progress through grades, and negative social influences.

“Boys, largely because of their notion of masculinity, rather dropout of schools than to remain in school and face repeated failures in grades,” he stated.

Ramrathan also criticised the current school curriculum, arguing it “channels all learners towards higher education, but only 17% can be accommodated within public higher education institutions”.

For boys with no interest in higher education, he posed a fundamental question: “What purpose then would a curriculum channelling learners towards higher education mean?”

As Professor Maistry argued, effective, sustainable change must address all three dimensions simultaneously — “providing economic support, challenging harmful masculine stereotypes, and building community structures that offer boys safe, dignified pathways to adulthood. School education is just one piece of the puzzle.”

Have thoughts on this topic or other subjects you’d like us to explore? Want to share your experiences? Reach out to me at karen.singh@inl.co.za – I’d love to hear from you!