On 4 September, the Competition Commission published its third Cost of Living Report. Between January 2020 and July 2026, public primary school fees rose 46% and public secondary fees 51%, against headline inflation of roughly 36%. The Commission’s explanation has almost nothing to do with teaching. It points at municipal service charges, infrastructure maintenance and operating costs that government funding does not fully cover.

Stats SA’s July consumer price index puts electricity tariffs up 8.1% in 2026 and water up 10.2%, against headline inflation of 4.3% in the year to July. Widen the window and the gap opens. The Commission puts electricity up about 100% and water up about 85% since January 2020, and petrol rose 26% in the first half of this year.

Now look at what a campus school is. Take the prospectus away and you have a property operation with teaching inside it: classrooms, halls, fields, kitchens, boarding, a bus fleet and insurance over all of it. Each is indexed to a municipal tariff, a fuel price or a maintenance contract. The only line genuinely about teaching is the wage bill, and that is the one a school has least room to move.

The annual fee letter, then, is largely a passthrough. Parents read it as the price of education. Much of it is the price of the buildings education happens in. That is not an accusation, since schools have to settle the accounts they are sent. It explains why the increase arrives whether or not anything about the teaching changed.

CambriLearn has been teaching online for two decades, with more than 80 000 students in over 100 countries across five curricula and six pathways, from Caps (the national Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement) and its Afrikaans equivalent, KABV, to the IEB (Independent Examinations Board), the International British Curriculum and Pearson Edexcel, with the US K-12 route running through sister school Score Academy Online.

Every teacher holds a recognised teaching degree and is registered with the South African Council for Educators (SACE), and on average they have spent more than eight years in front of a class. Every assignment comes back marked by the subject teacher within eight working days.

Accredited

The school is accredited by Cognia and Pearson Edexcel and registered with the South African Comprehensive Assessment Institute (Sacai) and the IEB. It is also approved by the US National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It carries 386 parent reviews on Google, Hellopeter, Trustpilot and Facebook, averaging 4.8 out of 5 across the four sites.

Its cost base is teachers, curriculum, assessment and software the school wrote itself. CambriOS, its in-house platform, went live in August, connecting the timetable, the coursework and the reporting parents see. Salaries track wage cycles, software tracks engineering cost and neither tracks a municipal tariff. A school that takes on another hundred students hires teachers. It does not buy a boiler, a field or a bus.

That is why the next sentence is possible. Families who enrol before 30 November 2026 hold the 2026 fees for the whole 2027 academic year, on any grade and any package.

The examinations are the same either way. Caps and KABV learners sit the National Senior Certificate through Sacai and IEB learners through the IEB. A child needs a stable connection, a device and an adult who holds a routine, and some children want a big, loud school. For a family reading a 2027 fee letter and running the same arithmetic again, the point is that the increase is not a law of nature. It is a cost structure, and there is more than one.

Fee schedules are listed by grade and curriculum. Consultations are booked at cambrilearn.com, and the fee hold is set out at cambrilearn.com/lock-in-your-fees-2027.