Locked out of classroom, locked out of tech
Only three schools for South Africa’s Deaf learners teach maths, writes Edward van Niekerk, vocational programme coordinator at Belgium Campus iTversity.
Children as young as 13 must make subject choices that can shape what they study later and, ultimately, the careers open to them. It’s a big decision for such young learners, who may well change their minds multiple times before finishing school.
For Deaf learners, that decision is substantially more difficult because not every school offers the subject they wish to study, which can cut them off from several career choices.
This has a broader impact because Deaf learners may be cut off from fields desperately short of skills, including artificial intelligence, cyber security and software development.
What the data shows
Statistics South Africa’s 2022 Census shows gains in educational attainment among people with disabilities, yet the figures remain discouraging. In 2022, 23.7% of people with disabilities aged 25 and older had completed secondary education as their highest level of education, compared with 35.3% of those without disabilities.
Tertiary attainment was far closer, at 12.1% and 12.8%, respectively. The Census does not distinguish between types of disability, making it impossible to determine from these figures how many Deaf children finish high school or go on to tertiary education.
Yet, of South Africa’s 24,766 schools serving 13.6-million children as of 2025, only 43 are schools for the Deaf.
Counting the shortfall
Quantifying the scale of the shortfall is exceptionally difficult. A 2024 Statistics South Africa report based on the 2022 Census records 38,724 people with severe to profound hearing loss and a further 1.7-million aged five and older with mild to moderate hearing loss.
The scale of the problem with the data becomes clear when trying to do even rudimentary maths. People aged five to 24 account for about 37% of South Africa’s population aged five and older. Applying that proportion to the 1.77-million people reporting some degree of hearing difficulty produces an estimate of around 656,000 young people.
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