The Pretoria high court on Friday confirmed that matric results may be published on public platforms, as they had been since 2022, using candidates’ examination numbers.
The court’s ruling followed an appeal by the minister of education to have an enforcement notice issued by the Information Regulator (IR) last year prohibiting the publication of the results in newspapers set aside.
AfriForum, which was party to the court appeal, welcomed the judgment and said it viewed it as a victory, especially for the protection of public interests.
The judgment, by the full bench, found that the IR’s argument that pupils would memorise each other’s examination numbers to study their results was unrealistic.
The enforcement notice by the IR last year required the department not to publish the 2024 matric results in newspapers and instead make them available using methods compliant with the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia), such as pupils obtaining their results from their schools or via a secure SMS platform from the department of basic education (DBE).
Regarding the 2025 results, the regulator required the DBE to obtain the consent of pupils over 18, or the parents of those under 18, before publishing their results in newspapers.
The department did not comply with the notice last year, prompting the regulator to approach the court for enforcement proceedings on an urgent basis earlier this year. Judge Ronel Tolmay struck the IR’s enforcement application off the roll for lack of urgency on January 8.
In her appeal against the enforcement notice, the minister said the IR was bound by a 2022 court order by judge Anthony Millar, which confirmed the lawfulness of publishing matric results consisting only of examination numbers and corresponding results in local papers.
The minister and the DBE also said the published information did not constitute “personal information” for purposes of Popia.
“That is because such information is not related to an identifiable learner, and no reader of a local newspaper can reasonably be expected to identify a particular learner from the published information,” the court said, summarising the submissions by the minister and the department.
The IR disputed this, arguing that publication made identification possible because examination numbers were issued sequentially and pupils sat in the examination rooms in the same order as those numbers. This, the IR said, made it possible for pupils to determine others’ numbers “by simply looking at the sequence of examination numbers published in the local newspapers”.
The court said the IR’s contention was fanciful and akin to a poorly constructed thought experiment.
“The regulator’s stance does not reflect events in the real world,” judge Omphemetse Mooki said, in a judgment concurred with by two other judges.
Mooki said it would be very unusual for a pupil — after preparing for examinations, sitting for various papers over weeks and waiting several more weeks for results — to recall who sat next to them, work out a sequence of examination numbers and then concern themselves with how that other pupil performed.
Mooki held that the manner of publication of the results did not constitute the processing of personally identifiable information and therefore no infringement of the right to privacy arose.
Alana Bailey, AfriForum’s head of cultural affairs, said: “This year’s matriculants as well as future ones will now still have access to their results and AfriForum is grateful that we were able to protect their rights in this regard.”
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