Schooling in Soweto

So it has been a roller-coaster of a week! But I have loved it! Despite a few hiccups on the first day (the staff we encountered on our arrival didn't seem to know anything about the Warwick in Africa scheme and weren't aware that we would be teaching there for 6 weeks), I feel I am now well settled into the school. The teachers are friendly and in many cases eager to learn and observe our teaching methods. The students are enthusiastic (although sometimes a little too enthusiastic!), very polite and (in general) well behaved.

I can’t help but make a comparison between the students out here in Soweto and the pupils in England. Until coming out here, I didn't realise how fortunate British kids are in schools in England – even in the disadvantaged and struggling schools.

Schools and colleges in England get so much support and funding from the government and guidance from the department of education. You can walk into any classroom in any school and you’ll find it fully heated and equipped with a large whiteboard or a computer linked to an interactive whiteboard (or possibly even both!). In Soweto, the classrooms have no heating and are absolutely freezing, often even being without doors, and glass in their windows. Coming from England you’d have thought I would be used to the cold, but at no point in the year would any school building in Britain be as cold as these classrooms. And there wouldn't be any whiteboard on the wall, just an old blackboard covered in holes and in desperate need of painting.

Every school in England is facilitated with at least one computer suite with enough computers (equipped with all the essential programmes as well as some more specialist software) for an entire class, whereas in Soweto, the only computers you would see would be the few in the staffroom for organising teaching resources. Every English school’s store cupboard is full to brim with teaching resources, mini whiteboards, whiteboard pens, coloured paper and card, stationery, dictionaries and other reference books, reading material and textbooks. In the schools out here there is no store cupboard. The only textbooks you see are those the teachers carry around and the 4 or 5 textbooks that your class of 35 manage to muster together in your lesson.

Our students have so many resources, so many facilities and so many enthusiastic teachers, yet they don’t want to learn. The South African kids are so eager to learn yet all they have to guide them through the syllabus is their teacher - and even teachers here are in short supply. And the reason for their enthusiasm: they realise the importance of respect, the importance of education, the importance of qualifications. They realise that if they work hard they can get a good respectable job, in the hope that one day they can afford to leave the township and make a better future for themselves and their children.

Why can’t British children realise this?

So in summary, I am really enjoying teaching these students, and I feel they seem to be enjoying and benefiting from my lessons. I am covering a range of topics including perimeter and area and probability. But although I want to get through the syllabus, I have already decided that my main mission is to get all these students multiplying, dividing, adding, subtracting and manipulating numbers confidently without calculators – I have started banning them in my classes! And I feel I am already getting through to them.