The Department of Basic Education (DBE) has officially proposed policy changes that would permanently end the long-standing split between inland and coastal school calendars in South Africa.
The move, which has been published for public comment, would see all schools across the country following a single, standardised academic calendar, effectively scrapping the staggered start dates that have defined the school year for decades.
Historically, inland schools, including those in Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Free State and North West, began the academic year a week earlier than coastal schools in provinces such as the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Northern Cape.
The arrangement was introduced years ago to accommodate families returning from holidays and to give educators time to prepare for the term ahead, as reported by Business Tech. However, the system was thrown into disarray during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns and school closures forced the DBE to rethink how the academic year was structured.
Between 2020 and 2022, South African schools were required to make drastic changes to adapt to the national state of disaster, with calendars repeatedly amended to recover lost teaching time. In 2023, the department briefly reintroduced the staggered approach, but by 2024 it had reverted to a unified start date, a system that has continued into 2025 and now looks set to become permanent.
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The DBE says the proposed policy aims to ‘regularise’ the school year and ensure more consistent planning nationwide. It also seeks to maximise teaching days by aligning the school schedule with public holidays and preventing the late starts that can push the entire academic year back.
‘All possible steps must be taken to avoid a late start to the school year,’ the department previously noted, explaining that a late January opening reduces the number of teaching days available. The department added that the focus is on preventing any loss of instructional time while maintaining balance between terms.
If implemented, the amendment would remove the policy distinctions between regions and set a national rule that all schools open during the third week of January, with all terms following the same structure.
The DBE is inviting public feedback on the proposal, with submissions directed to [email protected] and [email protected].
In addition to the calendar policy revisions, the department has also gazetted the draft school calendar for 2028, which is now open for comment. The DBE routinely releases draft calendars years in advance; the 2025 version was published for comment in 2022 and finalised in early 2023, while calendars for 2026 and 2027 were gazetted in 2024.
The department’s new proposal marks a significant step toward permanently unifying the school year across all provinces, a change that would simplify scheduling for learners, parents and educators nationwide.
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