The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) has agreed to run the Vrygrond Primary School as a State school, which means it will bear the annual running costs, including of course the major expense of employing the staff. Their resources are however stretched over thousands of schools in the Province, and they cannot give the same level of educational service as we would want. If this school is to become a model of how to deliver good quality education to a poor community, we will need to raise funds to pay for extra educational support and intervention, in addition to that which the state provides.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:
Education is one of the areas which still suffers profoundly from the effects of Apartheid. Although all State run schools now fall under the control of one Department of Education, there is a massive gap between the schools which were previously for whites only and the rest, especially the previously “black schools”. The top state schools in South Africa are on a par with those in any first world country. Many of them have magnificent buildings and grounds that would be the envy of an English private school.

Although the State has justifiably diverted money from the previously advantaged schools to the poor ones, the truth is that in 13 years since democracy, the Government has failed to make much progress in lifting the standards of the poor schools. There have been erratic swings from one fashionable educational theory to another, compounded by the decision to encourage thousands of the most experienced teachers to retire from the professions, in the interests of promoting black teachers to take their places.

Of course there are heart-warming success stories where dedicated teachers manage to achieve excellent results in the most adverse conditions. But for every one of these, there are hundreds of schools where ill-qualified, incompetent and unmotivated teachers preside over classes of 50 or 60 kids who are promoted every year without the least pretence of passing exams.

It is against this background, that having a school in a desperately poor area like Vrygrond, which bucks this trend and delivers excellent education, will be a sort of a miracle.

OUR AIM:
The “miracle” here is quite modest. Educationalists have established that the effect of the economic and social deprivation in places like Vrygrond is that the children are between 2 and 3 years behind their appropriate age levels. The miracle would be if, after 4 years at our school, they emerge at the educational levels appropriate for their age. That does not seem a lot to ask, does it?

And these levels are measurable. Educationalists measure the kids when they come into the school, and do the same as they progress, and eventually leave. We do not rely on the “feel-good” factor, but on simple measurable tests that will show whether we are achieving the results we want.

HOW TO DO IT:
Given the above, it struck me that we need to apply remedial teaching to a large proportion, maybe the majority, of Vrygrond kids. Since I know nothing about early childhood education, I made a point of talking to a wide number of professionals in this field, and, more importantly, sitting in on remedial classes in which kids are taught to read, write and converse. To my mild surprise, I found that the field of early childhood education is a minefield of competing theories and practices, in which the phonic devotees hardly speak to the cognitives, and so on.

PERSONAL ATTENTION:
The one constant thread running through all of them is to give children as much one on one time with a teacher as possible. We need to take the identified children out of class at least once a week, preferably twice, for a 40 minute one-on-one session with a ‘teacher’.

I put ‘teacher’ in quotation marks since the methods of teaching can be relatively easily taught to any competent adult. It does not need a qualified teacher. In one of the places I visited, (the Shine Remedial Centre attached to Observatory Primary School), they rely on volunteers from the local community, who have been trained how to give the lessons. Not only does this relieve us of paying for a large amount of extra teaching, it helps connect the school with the surrounding communities. In the case of Vrygrond, we may find such volunteers in the community, as well as from our wealthy neighbours in Marina da Gama across the highway. The volunteers take their jobs very seriously, and turn up religiously for their slots. After the initial training, the job of the managing the roster of volunteers becomes as important as anything else!

SMALL CLASSES:
The other “secret” which is obvious to anyone, is to have manageable sized classes. We want a maximum of 30 kids per class, and need to employ a Teacher’s Assistant for each class. This allows individual attention to be given to struggling pupils, without abandoning the rest of the class.

Here we have an example of needing to supplement what the Dept of Education will provide. They will provide us with 1 teacher for 40 kids: that is their rule. So for our 360 kids they would employ 9 teachers. If we want 30 per class, then we need a total of 12 teachers, and we will have to employ the extra 3 ourselves. A teacher’s salary is around R9,000 (£650) per month, so there is an immediate cost of R27,000 (£1,900) per month for us to bear.

Teacher’s assistants will be enthusiastic young matriculants who have not found jobs, and will happily be trained to teach. The salary will be about R2000 (£140) per month. One for each of the 12 classes means another R24,000 (£1,700) per month added to the wage bill.

SOCIAL WORKER:
Another element is to have at last one full time Social Worker dedicated only to our school. Vrygrond, like many other poor areas on the Cape Flats, is rife with alcohol and drug abuse. Fathers abandon families, leaving many single mother households. Where there is a man at home, he is often drunk and abusive to the woman and the children. And where there is not active abuse, there is often just neglect. Children grow up in a home where there is no real talking between adults, little intellectual stimulation, and virtually no reading at all.

There are clinically established signs of distress in children, and our teachers must be able to recognise changes in behaviour which indicate these. The Social worker needs to visit these homes, engage with the families, and monitor what goes on. In some cases the situation may be too desperate for her to do much. But in many others her intervention may make a crucial difference to the child.

INVOLVING THE PARENTS:
What follows from the above, is that many parents simply do not know how to parent. We need to invite groups of parents to the school and have professionals explain to them how they can help their children’s education. Even illiterate parents can take time to tell stories to their children.
Many parents will not bother to turn up, but many will. The effect of teaching parents will spread far beyond the pupils at our school. A well-run school which engages with the community, can be much more than a place where children are educated. It can be a real force for effecting social change and improvement. We must try and see that the Vrygrond school is such a force.

LANGUAGE:
Vrygrond was originally a “Coloured” community, where Afrikaans was the dominant language. Over the last 15 years there has been an influx of largely Xhosa speaking blacks, and now the community is roughly half-half. So what should the language of instruction be?

There is a lot of research that indicates that teaching a child in its home language for the first six years helps that child in almost every sphere of education. The logic is overwhelming. Being at school is itself a challenging experience for any child. How much more challenging to arrive and be taught in a foreign language! It is like our kids going to school and finding that the medium of instruction is Italian. No wonder Xhosa speaking children struggle at school.

So the accepted theory is to teach the child in his own language for the first 6 years, while at the same time teaching him English as a second language. After 6 years the medium of instruction is then switched to English.

That’s the theory. And here is why it cannot be applied in Vrygrond (and probably nowhere else in SA either!).

1. In a community with two major languages it would mean segregating classes according to language, ie one class for Coloureds being taught in Afrikaans, and another for Xhosa speakers. Language education policy then becomes an instrument of linguistic and cultural apartheid. Education ought to encourage mixing instead of emphasising linguistic and ethnic separation.
    

2. The parents themselves, esp the Xhosa parents, strongly request that their kids be taught in English, for the obvious reason that English is the language of jobs and education. Own language education will involve overruling the democratic wishes of the majority of parents.
    

3. A crucial element of this theory is that it requires a high standard of English teaching during the first 6 years, so that when the language of instruction changes, the children are fluent enough in English to cope. The sad reality in the vast majority of SA schools is that most teachers are not fluent in English, and in addition are often just not good teachers either. The result is that the kids are effectively taught solely in Xhosa, and their English is very poor. So all this policy is doing is postponing the trauma of English language acquisition from Grade 1 to Grade 6 or 7. It makes far more sense to acquaint the kids with English so they feel comfortable in the language, as early as possible, rather than wait 7 years when the disruption to their learning will be far more serious.

So Vrygrond will be an English medium school in which both Xhosa and Afrikaans are taught as subjects. We will pay special attention in the first year to ensuring that the children are taught English as well as possible. In addition we will follow a policy of matching class teachers with teaching assistants so that every class has one Xhosa and one Afrikaans speaking teacher.

Help fund this new primary school in Vrygrond.