Fresh from his midyear accounting paper, Kuitumetse “Junior” Mukhiti is hanging around the principal’s office. He’s hoping to get the results of the grade 12 maths paper he wrote a few days ago. Maths is his thing — along with science.
“I want to be a mathematician, or a mechatronic engineer,” the 18-year-old tells the FM.
Mukhiti got 95% for his most recent science paper, but looks somewhat disappointed when his maths teacher, school principal Mukosi Leonard Mudavhi, hands him his paper. He’s achieved 83%.
In any other township school, 83% would be considered a huge achievement, but at Forte Secondary School in Dobsonville, Soweto, pupils are pushed to improve all the time. Mukhiti is eyeing 100% perfection.
In 2008, Forte was nowhere near the top school rankings in Gauteng: its matric pass rate was just 52%, with 18% of its matriculants achieving bachelor’s passes (allowing admission to university). That year, the school partnered with One School at a Time, an initiative by comms group Joe Public United.
One School at a Time helps to run workshops to help teachers define their purpose, and contributes to incentives, awards and school outings. A director from the initiative visits the school each week to keep in touch.
Forte’s results showed an uptick from the time the initiative took root — an upward trajectory that continued when Mudavhi joined the school in 2011. By 2020, it was the top-performing township school in Gauteng, with a 98% pass rate and 80% bachelor’s passes.
The bigger picture
Forte is an exception in a country where education is still failing most pupils. In 2016, the benchmark “Progress in International Reading Literacy Study” (Pirls) found more than three-quarters of nine-year-old children in SA couldn’t read for meaning. In Limpopo the figure was as high as 91%.
For every 100 learners who start school in SA, about 60 will make it to matric, roughly 40 will pass, and only 14 will achieve bachelor’s passes (about 12 actually go on to university).
Amnesty International, in its 2019 report “Broken and Unequal: The State of Education in SA”, points out how the failings of the education system are closely linked to historical inequalities.
“SA has one of the most unequal school systems in the world,” Amnesty SA executive director Shenilla Mohamed said at the time. “Children in the top 200 schools achieve more distinctions in mathematics than children in the next 6,600 schools combined.”
The report points out that schools and the communities they are in still live with the consequences of apartheid. “The result is that a child’s experience of education in SA still very much depends on where they are born, how wealthy they are, and the colour of their skin,” the authors write.
School infrastructure is also a huge problem. Government statistics show that 19% of schools still had illegal pit latrines in 2018, 86% had no laboratory, 77% had no library, 72% had no internet access and 42% had no sports facilities.
Money, it seems, is not the central issue. The International Monetary Fund’s 2019 “Struggling to Make the Grade” report says SA’s education budget as a percentage of GDP is comparable with those in Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development countries. But most of the system’s failings are due to “insufficient subject knowledge of some teachers, history, race, language, geographic location, and socioeconomic status”.
It’s a vicious cycle. Low educational achievement contributes to low productivity growth, and in turn to high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
But with the right interventions, some schools have bucked the trend.
In the Free State, for example, the Kagiso Trust’s relationship with education authorities is cited as one reason the province is consistently among SA’s top performers. And in Limpopo, 96% of the grade 12s who attended Kagiso’s maths, science and accounting camps in Sekhukhune East passed those subjects last year.
In Limpopo, the Eastern Cape and Western Cape, nonprofit organisation Funda Wande has partnered successfully with provincial education departments. It focuses primarily on the foundation phase in no-fee schools, providing teachers with literacy and numeracy support. The programme also trains matriculants in Limpopo as teacher assistants to improve reading and mathematics.
Compared with their peers, the grade 1s in schools with the Funda Wande assistants are 14 percentage points more likely to be able to read at least one word, and 10 percentage points more likely to do at least one subtraction sum.
Leading the way
Leadership is one of the most important determinants of school success. That’s the view of Pepe Marais, co-founder of Joe Public and chair of its schools initiative. For this reason, he believes one of the biggest problems facing education is “the fact that we don’t see our principals as CEOs”.
At Forte, Mudavhi believes it is participatory leadership and purpose that set the school apart. “When you involve educators and stakeholders, they must understand what we are here for and where we are heading,” he tells the FM.
Forte is a government school, with all the associated challenges that come with the tag: a lack of resources and infrastructure, for example, and children from poor families, often headed by children or grandparents.
In that context, Mudavhi and his team are doing “the best we can under the circumstances”. And, he adds, he embraces excellence. “Any school I’ll be at and that I touch, I want to be an A-principal.”
Mudavhi chose to teach maths on top of his job as principal because it brings him closer to the pupils. It also allows him to see things from the teachers’ perspective, and appreciate better the challenges they might be experiencing.
Since becoming principal, he’s taken some practical steps to improve outcomes at Forte — including by reducing classes to a maximum of 40 pupils (he believes 26 is the ideal). Though this was initially necessitated by Covid, the individual attention pupils received was a significant driver of the school’s 2020 pass rate.
He also considers proper nutrition to be vital, and a team of women from the community cooks healthy meals for the pupils. Mudavhi says he doesn’t limit the amount the schoolchildren eat; some get little to no food at home. On Saturdays, the grade 12s get meat and chicken feet as an extra incentive to attend classes. And the school rewards good results with awards ceremonies, outings and treats, for teachers and pupils alike.
Forte has a strong focus on its grade 12 results. Its highest pass rate was in 2020, at 97.8%, but Mudavhi is aiming for 100%. At a minimum, he’d like to see 70% bachelor passes, against the district goal of 60%.
To that end, pupils are divided into groups according to performance and encouraged to improve their results to join a higher group, while Saturday classes are offered to improve problem areas.
After the midyear exams, attention turns to those who are struggling, with one teacher assigned to the top learners, a second to the average learners, and another for those who are at risk of failing. Pupils can move between these classes based on performance, so they could end up being taught the same subject by different teachers, Mudavhi says.
He has also appointed a younger cohort of teachers, and says the generational mix of energy and experience has worked well. “Young teachers have got these new ideas, and you must allow them to bring these ideas,” he says.
Refilwe Sumbane, 30, is one of these younger hires. She believes they coped better than their older colleagues during Covid, when teaching turned to WhatsApp, because they’re more tech-savvy.
In all, it’s meant the school punches above its weight. “We are competing with former model C schools, even though we are working in a no-fee-paying school, and we are showing them flames,” Mudavhi says. “We have produced doctors, engineers, technicians ... every kind of profession. We tell learners when they join the school: ‘We want you to pass with quality results and go to varsity.’”
Making a difference
Hector Peterson Secondary School in Wallacedene, on the outskirts of Cape Town, offers another example of the difference solid school management can make.
After eight years at the helm, principal Mike Mavovana left Hector Peterson in 2009 to take up a position at West Coast College. But he returned in 2017, after his successor moved on. In his absence, the matric pass rate had dropped to just 65% — but it climbed steadily on his return, reaching 78.4% last year.
For 2022, he’s hoping for 82%. But he’s not stopping there. “We are not yet where we want to be,” he tells the FM — the magic 100%, in other words.
For Mavovana, success hinges on everyone working well together. “The problem in many of our schools is there is no harmony in the school management team,” he says. “I’ve got a very dynamic school management team. We are open and discuss the issues openly and frankly.”
In his school, everyone gets to participate in important discussions, and decisions are taken democratically. “It’s a form of ownership,” he says. “Sometimes when you debate issues, it may take a little longer, but the outcome is important.”
The same goes for interaction with the school governing body. And, he adds, it’s important to find the right kind of personality. “I’m not bossy,” he says by way of explanation. “I’m just a boss among equals.”
In addition to fundraising drives and sponsorships, Hector Peterson has been able to subsidise extras for its pupils by asking parents for a contribution (R320 for 2022). Parents pay 50% of the money at registration, with the option to pay the balance in instalments. This money has funded computer rooms, a school bus, and outings (some overseas) for the pupils.
“If you’re transparent enough in the school about what you’re doing with the money, parents are happy to give it,” he says.
Underscoring this is a real sense of community, with the children of former pupils coming to follow in their parents’ footsteps.
“I’m comfortable where I am right now,” Mavovana muses. “The community embraced me back, and they needed me back at the time. I’m grateful for the staff that I have, and the parents.”
Besides strong, dedicated leadership, successful schools also make education a collaborative effort between teachers, parents and pupils. That’s the case, at least, for two small rural schools in the Eastern Cape.
At Ngqalwa Secondary in Tsolo, Eastern Cape, the pass rate went from 28% in 2018 — a year in which not a single pupil passed maths and physics — to 88.6% in 2021. The difference? District education authorities appointed Abonga Mdze, 29, first as head of department for maths and science, and then as principal.
In part, the school’s success is the fruit of Mdze’s Ilima programme — Xhosa for “coming together with a singular mission” — through which he introduced evening classes, and Saturday and Sunday revision sessions. After-hours classes are something of a tried and tested method for him: back in 2015, he started a “winter school” that showed such promise it was picked up by the education department, and rolled out elsewhere.
As he told government newspaper Vuk’uzenzele, the success lay in “involv[ing] all the teachers under my supervision. I also engaged with pupils and parents.”
Ndema Senior Secondary principal Vuyisa Bukula is another firm believer in the importance of engagement. Last year, he helped the school to its first 100% pass rate since 1976, after being appointed only at the end of May. Before this, the recent pass rate fluctuated between 33% and 78%.
Bukula, who matriculated from Ndema in 1994, had kept track of his old school’s performance, and leapt at the opportunity to improve it when he saw the advert for a principal. Since taking up the position, he’s worked to instil discipline among pupils and teachers alike.
“If you get into the inner souls of the learners so that they understand your mission and your vision, then, more than anything ... you see there are many people who can benefit out of your hard work,” he tells the FM.
Stumbling blocks
Still, relatively simple things can get in the way of achievement. Time management, for example.
As University of Cape Town education lecturer Xolisa Guzula explains, her “Learner Progress and Achievement Study”, with a focus on school culture and management in the Western Cape in 1998 and 1999, and her inservice teacher training in the Western Cape (2000-2011) and the Eastern Cape (2013-2014) have shown that outcomes were poor in schools where the principal wasn’t strict about timekeeping for pupils and teachers, which led to a loss of teaching time. Other problems included teacher union meetings taking place during school hours, and teachers being overwhelmed by the school syllabus and in need of assistance with planning timetables for subjects such as literacy.
When it comes to teaching the literacy curriculum, “I tend to think of literacy as a whole pizza, with slices”, Guzula says. “Each slice contributes to the whole. Many of the teachers only know one slice of the pizza and only teach one slice, because they don’t know what else they have to do.”
The problem is that in big rural provinces with bad roads, like the Eastern Cape, it’s difficult to go out and do teacher training and evaluation. But while such problems could be remedied with additional resources and some political will, other problems are bigger and more systemic.
Asked in which direction education in SA is going, Guzula says: “I think we’re not getting better.”
She believes a narrow focus on technical skills in no-fee schools is impoverishing the curriculum. “For me the sad situation is where mostly black learners are being taught through the skills-based approaches only. If they are in [former] model-C schools, children get enriched skills, where there are libraries and parents who read to children to encourage such enriched skills.”
Language is also an issue for black children, most of whom are affected by the switch from mother-tongue education to English as a medium of instruction in grade 4.
“We realise the power of English in terms of the economy,” Guzula says. But while children should be taught bilingually, she believes English should be “add[ed] gradually, so you have two mediums of instruction for science, maths, history, and [you] allow children and teachers to move back and forth between the two languages to negotiate meaning”.
— Xolisa Guzula
It is heartbreaking when you go to a school and realise that children don’t understand a thing
Parents, she notes, are more open to bilingual education.
It’s not that this isn’t an option: government policy has allowed teachers to teach bilingually since 1997, according to Guzula. Only, this has never been implemented. And so, because children don’t understand English properly, they simply memorise and reproduce the textbook.
“It is heartbreaking when you go to a school and realise that children don’t understand a thing,” she says.
While some argue that content and technical knowledge matter more than the language of instruction, Guzula says this is patently untrue. “You can’t divorce language from content. Language is like infrastructure — it is part of the conditions that allow children to learn optimally.”
So what, then, makes for success? According to Nic Spaull, founder of Funda Wande and associate professor in economics at Stellenbosch University, it’s difficult to objectively measure the factors that contribute to schools performing above demographic expectations.
“Those schools performing well against the odds often do so because they have unusual levels of support and can recruit above the odds,” he tells the FM — and this often involves money and in-kind contributions above education department allocations, for example in schools run by churches.
On the whole, he believes success or failure hinges on the foundation phase. However, measuring performance across primary schools is problematic, as there is no standard national exam by which they can be compared. Evaluations for grades 3, 6 and 9 were introduced in 2011, but stopped three years later after unions objected.
Spaull says there is a case for bringing this kind of measurement back as a universal rather than a sample-based assessment, which means all grade 3, 6 and 9 learners are assessed. “We could use it to find if schools need more accountability and support,” he says. “It would also send strong signals to teachers as to what is important, and raise public awareness of what is going on in primary schools.”
Principals at no-fee schools say engagement — between principals, teachers, pupils and the broader community — is essential to successful educational outcomes
— What it means:
Making changes
Though education outcomes in SA were generally on the rise, Covid set SA children back by a year, basic education spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga tells the FM, citing research by Stellenbosch University’s Martin Gustafsson. Its effects, he says, will be felt “for years to come”.
Nonetheless, the department has been making interventions, including “curriculum and assessment reforms, continuous and pointed teacher development programmes, the provision of appropriate learning and teaching support programmes and materials”. It’s also focused on the provision of psychosocial services and fit-for-purpose school infrastructure, and “strategies and programmes for the reading revolution”.
When it comes to the devastating 2016 Pirls study, Mhlanga sees things from a “glass half-full” perspective. Pirls at least showed that grade 4 reading had “improved substantially between 2006 and 2016”, he says — at a rate slower only than Morocco’s.
Since then, the department’s early grade reading programme’s paper-based lesson plans and in-person coaching visits have “delivered robust evidence of sustained impacts on reading outcomes”, he says — though he admits implementation has proved more difficult. (The department has appointed more than 287,000 teaching assistants to aid the rollout.)
On the issue of numeracy, the Eastern Cape is the only province to have piloted the department’s mother tongue-based bilingual education strategy for maths, science and technology — a programme that was developed in 2012 already. Given the lag, it’s no surprise that minister Angie Motshekga admitted in her budget speech to parliament last month that a “policy shift” is needed on the switchover to English after grade 3.
In any event, Mhlanga says the teaching of some gateway subjects in Xhosa and Sesotho in the Eastern Cape is yielding positive results, and there is good work under way in the North West on this count too.
But more money is needed. While this year’s R29.6bn budget allocation for basic education was up 4.9% on last year, “the demand for education services in the public school system is growing at an alarming rate”, Mhlanga says. If the department is to appoint more qualified teachers and solve classroom overcrowding, for example, more funds will need to be found.
In the meantime, the department is “professionalising principals” by providing training and mentoring to improve leadership at government schools.
But there’s an additional, perhaps overlooked, source of inspiration for SA’s youth: peers may just be among the best role models, and excellence can beget excellence.
Take, for example, Katlego Ramonti, a grade 12 pupil at Forte Secondary. He says the success of former pupil Karabo Dinelelo — who matriculated with eight distinctions last year — has inspired him to greater heights.
“He was a top learner in Gauteng and he was from here. He is studying medicine now at Stellenbosch,” Ramonti says. “What I learnt from him is, no matter where you come from ... you always make the best of it. You must put your whole self in it, that is my motivation.”
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