27,297 government and private schools, with the exam results NECTA published for each. Facts to compare, not recommendations.
4,905
government secondary schools, free of tuition
1,364
private secondary schools
73%
of secondary schools are free government schools
The remaining 496 secondary centres are not private. They appear in NECTA's results with no TAMISEMI census record, and 298 of them are in Zanzibar, which the mainland census does not survey, so counting them as private would overstate private secondary schools by more than a third. Primary: 18,054 government and 2,478 private, of 20,532 schools.
Ranked on mean CSEE 2025 GPA, lower being better, among schools that presented at least 40 candidates, NECTA's own category threshold. Without it a three-candidate centre on a perfect score outranks Ilboru.
Boys, girls or mixed
Girls-only schools outnumber boys-only, nearly two to one.
Bar = share of schools · figure = mean CSEE 2025 GPA, lower is better
Council type
Two in three secondary schools sit under a rural district council.
8 Zanzibar councils carry no TAMISEMI suffix
No council on record
Bar = share of schools · figure = mean CSEE 2025 GPA, lower is better
This describes the council, not the school's own surroundings. A remote ward inside a city council still counts as city here. City councils do post better mean GPAs than rural ones, 3.17 against 3.46, but that gap is far smaller than the gap between the best and worst schools inside any one group.
Single-sex schools post much stronger mean GPAs: 1.97 for boys' schools and 2.16 for girls' against 3.48 for mixed. Read that with care: 285 of the 447 single-sex schools are private and 82 are seminaries, so this compares selective, fee-charging intakes with the schools that take everyone.
5 of 31 regions have no private secondary school with a usable result, so they are not listed.
What results can't tell you
Three things parents ask that no NECTA or TAMISEMI file records, and how to find them out for yourself.
Fees
NECTA records results, not costs. Government schools charge no tuition but do levy contributions, and private fees range a hundredfold.
Ask the school
Boarding & transport
No government file records it, and guessing from single-sex or seminary status would only look like data.
Check in person
Teaching & values
A GPA measures what students score, not how they are taught or treated.
Ask other parents
About this data. 496 secondary centres appear in exam results with no census record, and 424 have no council at all. TAMISEMI's census covers the mainland only, so Zanzibar carries results but little else.
Free, and worth looking at.
Only 8 of the national top 100 are government schools, against 84 private. But the best of them scores 1.14, ahead of all but a handful of private schools in the country, and they charge no fees. The spread matters more than the average.