For most South African parents, education is the biggest investment they will ever make on behalf of their child, and one of the hardest to evaluate with real confidence. School fees are concrete. Transport costs are concrete. Uniforms, stationery, devices, aftercare, extra lessons and sports tours all show up in black and white. But the true “return” – the academic progress, the confidence, the independence, the long-term options that open up, is often treated as something you can only judge years later.
That’s why so many families default to a familiar shortcut: reputation. If a school has a strong legacy, a popular waiting list, or a long history of top results, it can feel safer. But South Africa is entering an era where “safe” is no longer enough. The world our children are growing up into is shaped by rapid change: AI, shifting job markets, new forms of assessment, and a global economy that rewards learners who can adapt quickly, think critically, and learn independently. In that context, hope is not a strategy, and brand alone isn’t a reliable proxy for your child’s outcomes.
Shifting the question from “Which school?” to “What works?”
Teneo School recently completed a multi-year analysis of learner performance as a result of its Smart School System™ that pushes this conversation into more measurable territory. By studying the results of more than 5,000 learners, Teneo found that a data-informed learning model not only preserves standards, it can accelerate them. The headline finding is straightforward: all learners in Teneo School improved their average marks by 12% in their first year, with the uplift compounding to 25% by year four.
For parents, that introduces a different way to think about “value”. Instead of choosing a school based primarily on perceived status, families can evaluate a system based on the progress it consistently produces over time, the learning dividend it generates, year after year, for all learners, not just the top few.
“Parents are making one of the most important investments of their children’s lives, and for a long time they’ve had to rely on reputation as a proxy for individual results,” says Saul Geffen, CEO of Teneo School and founder of the Smart School System™. “We’ve tested our model properly across thousands of learners. The data is clear: when targeted academic support is triggered early, learners’ marks improve. ”
The hidden cost of traditional schooling: “data lag”
To understand why the dividend matters, it helps to look at a structural weakness inside many traditional models: what Teneo calls data lag. In a typical brick-and-mortar environment, a learner can drift off course quietly for months. They miss a concept in February. They begin to lose confidence in March. Their marks fall in April. Only then does the problem show up clearly enough to trigger action.
This delayed feedback loop is not just inconvenient; it’s expensive. The longer a learner struggles without intervention, the more the gap widens, the more stress builds, and the harder it becomes to recover. In an economy that increasingly rewards speed, adaptability and confidence, slow feedback becomes a liability. It produces the kind of “silent underperformance” that parents often only discover once it has already affected results.
Teneo’s approach is to remove that delay by digitising the learning ecosystem and treating support as something that happens in real time, not retrospectively. The Smart School System™ isn’t positioned as “Zoom school” or online worksheets. It functions as a learning engine: engagement and progress signals are tracked continuously, giving teachers earlier visibility into where learners are stuck, disengaging, or falling behind. The goal is simple: intervene before small issues become large academic setbacks.
Technology that strengthens teaching, not replaces it
One of the biggest misconceptions about modern or “smart” schooling is that it’s a substitute for human teaching. The more accurate description is the opposite: good technology protects teaching time.
In many school environments, educators lose enormous amounts of energy to administration: attendance, tracking, manual marking processes, constant paperwork, and reporting. Over a year, that “admin tax” accumulates, and it means less time for the highest-value work: mentorship, feedback, skill-building, and emotional support.
A smart system automates the repetitive work so teachers can do more of what only humans can do well: explain ideas in different ways, encourage perseverance, spot emotional dips, help learners build study habits, and create the relationship-based confidence that often determines outcomes. If the learning dividend is the measurable result, then teacher time is one of the biggest drivers behind it.
A model that works beyond the “top performers”
Perhaps the most important implication of Teneo’s findings is that the system works for all learners of any ability, not only for the academically elite. Many traditional high-performing schools protect results through selection, entrance exams, waiting lists, and the ability to refuse late applicants. That isn’t a moral judgement; it’s simply how the model functions. But it makes it difficult to compare outcomes fairly, because high results can be a product of high selectivity. Additionally, schools don’t usually report on all their learners, just the top-performing learners.
Teneo School’s model, by contrast, is built around broad access. It maintains open admissions year-round, without entrance exams, and the data suggests that academic rigour and inclusivity don’t have to be opposites. In fact, one of the most telling internal insights is that 21% of Teneo’s top 100 most improved learners have self-reported learning barriers or neurodiversity.
That matters because South Africa’s future workforce cannot depend on a small pipeline of “perfect-fit” learners. The country needs systems that can unlock human potential across different learning styles, confidence levels, backgrounds and timelines. A schooling model that improves outcomes for a wide learner base isn’t only good for families, it’s good for the economy.
Motivation isn’t a personality trait, it’s a system outcome
Another practical challenge in education is motivation. Learners don’t fail because they lack intelligence; they often fail because they lose momentum. Confidence drops, effort becomes inconsistent, and the gap between intention and habit grows wider.
Teneo’s model uses behavioural science principles to make consistency easier. Rather than waiting for willpower, the system builds feedback loops that reinforce daily learning habits, through progress visibility, goal tracking, recognition, and structured routines. The point isn’t to “gamify” education for novelty; it’s to create a learning environment where effort is noticed, progress is visible, and discipline becomes sustainable. That’s exactly the kind of self-management skill that learners will need in tertiary education and in work.
The long-term hedge: local strength, global mobility
Parents are also increasingly thinking beyond Matric. The real question is not only “Will my child pass?” but “What options will my child have afterwards?” Employability and mobility are becoming core education outcomes. A modern curriculum needs to offer more than local compliance; it needs to build global currency.
Teneo School’s model is designed to support different pathways, including the South African CAPS curriculum and the British International Curriculum. For families, that provides a hedge: a child can pursue strong local outcomes while keeping doors open for international tertiary study, if that becomes relevant later. In an uncertain world, optionality is a form of security.
The new benchmark for educational value
The classroom of 2030 cannot run on the operating system of 1950. South African parents are already making sophisticated decisions in every other area of life, managing risk, budgeting carefully, and investing intentionally. Education deserves the same level of rigour.
The core message of the learning dividend is not that every child will improve by the same amount in the same time. Education is human, and progress isn’t perfectly linear. The message is more powerful, and more realistic: when schooling is designed as a measurable system, with fast feedback, reduced admin burden, structured support, systemic motivation and inclusive pathways, learners improve more consistently over time.
In other words, the best schools of the future won’t be defined only by history. They’ll be defined by what works, and by the outcomes they can prove.
