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Answer

South Africa

From the opening, development economists asked the same question: what does per-pupil spending at this level buy compared with distributing the same money across the state system? The academy's annual cost per student ran to many multiples of South African public school spending. The critique was never that the school failed its students. It was that a model which cannot be scaled is a demonstration rather than a solution, and that demonstrations do not educate the next cohort.

• Consistently high matriculation results, with university placement rates far above the national average for South African state schooling.
• Graduates in medicine, law, engineering and public service, many of the first in their families to complete tertiary education.
• A comprehensive support model — boarding, counselling, healthcare, university funding — that removed the attrition points that end most talented students' trajectories.
• A demonstration that the constraint on outcomes was resources and stability, not ability.