Changing Lives Through Whole School Development

For the past 10 years, the Adopt a School Foundation has been making a measurable and sustainable inpact in our Country’s most disadvantaged schools benefiting close to 90 thousand learners to date.  Whole School Development is a mechanism used to improve and uplift the academic infrastructural, social and security environment in schools.

Whole School Development aims primarily to ensure that schools have all the necessary resources to support an environment conducive to learning and teaching in every school, including leadership and communication, governance, quality of teaching, educator development, school safety, security and discipline, learner support systems in Mathematics, Science, counselling etc., motivation and team building, extra and co-curricular activities, parental volunteerism, maintenance of school structures and infrastructure development.

Since the implementation of WSD in some adopted schools, results have been encouraging, pass rates are increasing along with teacher and community moral.
School management teams, principals, and teaching staff are becoming more motivated as the application of WSD progresses. Moreover, pass rates have also improved. For example, at Tau Rapulane Secondary School in Northwest Province, the matric results improved from 39% to over 71% in the space of a year!

“It is our belief that Whole Schools Development implementation in all of our schools is the way forward for the Foundation if we are to achieve our goal of developing a schooling environment that is conducive to excellence in teaching and learning,” says Director of the Adopt a School Foundation, Stephen Lebere.

The statistics are dismal. South Africa has quite a few areas of concern with regards to the education system, such as below par matric results, disintegrated classrooms and limited resources just to name a few. Did you know that only 2 482 - less than 10 % of all schools in SA - have a fully stocked Science laboratory?

According to the language and literacy assessments report most Grade 3 and 6 pupils can’t count and are illiterate. Furthermore, Dean of Education at the University of Johannesburg, Sarah Gravett explains that these assessments not only indicate whether pupils can read and identify words, but also if they understand what they’re reading. The statistics are dismal.

With such demoralizing news, it is doubtful that the public education system will improve without further immediate assistance. With the introduction of the Adopt-a-School Foundation’s Whole School Development model, it is hope that some of these startling challenges may be redressed.

For more information about the Whole School Development Model please click here or call the Adopt-a-School Foundation on 011 384 8000