On a bright morning in Pretoria, the graduation hall at Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool was filled with relieved parents and proud teachers as the last name was called and the final candidate received a pass. All 294 learners who sat the 2025 matric exam passed, giving the school a 100% pass rate.
A “matric pass” means the learner met the minimum requirements to finish secondary school. A “bachelor’s pass”, achieved by more than 96% of the cohort, qualifies the learner for university degree studies. The school also recorded an average of 1.54 distinctions per learner, a figure that sits above the national private-school average of roughly 0.8 to 1.2 distinctions per learner.
This performance matters to parents who pay the R56 460 annual fee and to business owners who consider the school for their children. It shows that a fee-paying public school can deliver results that rival, and sometimes exceed, those of elite private institutions, without the same level of corporate sponsorship.
Affies was founded on 28 January 1920 by Jan Joubert and Reverend Chris Neethling. It began as a protest against English-only instruction and earned the nickname “rebelleskool”. Today the school operates as a Section 21 fee-paying public school, a model that allows it to charge tuition while remaining under the Department of Basic Education. In addition to tuition, hostel accommodation costs about R55 500 per year, giving the school a budget that many ordinary public schools lack.
Since July 2019, the school’s eighth headmaster, Peregrine Joynt, has led the campus. Joynt recently completed a master’s degree at the University of Pretoria, researching strategic leadership and academic performance in high-performing public secondary schools.
Leadership research findings
Joynt’s study identified three recurring factors behind sustained success: strong leadership, teachers who are willing to “go the extra mile”, and a shared sense of purpose among staff. He argues that principals view teachers as the school’s greatest asset and that high performance depends on cultivating that human capital through trust, distributed authority and collaborative curriculum monitoring.
The research also challenges the assumption that a school’s socio-economic context alone determines outcomes. While fee-paying schools enjoy resource advantages, Joynt found that under-resourced schools can still achieve exceptional results if they focus on committed staff, targeted interventions and community partnerships.
For SME owners, the lesson is clear: investing in people and culture can deliver returns that outweigh pure financial input. Joynt says the school now prioritises hiring educators who fit the school’s vision and retaining them through professional development and a supportive environment.
What the leadership research actually measured
Joynt’s finding, that committed staff and strong leadership culture can outweigh pure resource advantage, is a genuinely useful data point precisely because it was tested against a comparison most business advice never gets to make cleanly: a fee-paying public school competing directly against private schools with far larger marketing budgets and, in many cases, more generous facilities, yet still out-performing on distinctions per learner. That comparison strips away the usual confound in “culture beats resources” claims, since Affies is not under-resourced in absolute terms, it simply has less than the elite private schools it is being measured against, meaning the finding is about the marginal effect of culture and leadership once a reasonable resource floor is already in place, not a claim that culture alone can substitute for any resources at all.
For a small business owner, the more transferable part of the research is the specific mechanism Joynt identifies, distributed authority and collaborative monitoring, rather than command-and-control management from a single leader, since that describes an organisational design choice available to a ten-person firm just as much as a school with dozens of staff, and one that does not require the fee income Affies has access to.
