Two schools in Johannesburg

The first school we visited in Johannesburg was the African Leadership Academy, a new school for students between 16 and 18 which had just taken in its first intake of 180 students. The school was set on a green, leafy campus on the outskirts of Johannesburg in an area that was until recently farmland. Peacocks roamed the campus. They had been inherited from the printing college that used to be on the campus. Some of the staff told me that the peacocks were noisy and messy pests which had gone feral. If I wanted to take one with me, I would be welcome. This seemed implausible to me so I enquired further with the students. The students told me that, in fact, the peacocks were looked after by the cooks who fed them left over food from the students’ meals. They were thriving on it and the numbers were rising rapidly. Some of the peacocks were starting to show telltale signs of obesity.

The students were from all over Africa and 85 per cent of them received scholarships, meaning that the entry criteria were based on merit rather than wealth. Most of the recruitment was done on line and relied in part on academic achievement, but also on leadership potential. The founder, whom we met, was concerned that young potential leaders from Africa almost always went abroad to study and, in many cases, never returned. Students who received a scholarship signed a contract that they would return from study abroad to work in Africa for at least five years. So he wanted to nurture a new generation of African leaders at the school. They studied for A levels, because they were more flexible than the International Baccalaureate. The greater flexibility of A levels meant that the school could add three subjects to the curriculum: leadership, entrepreneurship and African studies – a very telling and modern combination I thought. The downside of A levels was that the curriculum was British, not African. Some of it was flexible; a young man I met was doing Literature and his set texts were Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, but there were inevitable irrelevances. The case study of hyper-inflation was Germany after the First World War, though the teachers felt that Zimbabwe in recent times might be more interesting and pertinent.

The students, with whom we had a long discussion, were wonderful: animated, argumentative, idealistic, articulate – terrific in every way. Every single one of them intended to study in the US if they could. Most had already identified which college they wanted to attend. This is surely a warning sign for British universities. Apparently, American universities have more flexible, less academic entry criteria (debatable, I suspect) and more numerous and more generous scholarships (undoubtedly true).

The other school we visited was Tulani School in Soweto. The school had more than 1000 pupils and had good facilities, both classrooms and playing fields, though no peacocks. The average class size was 56 but nevertheless more than 90 per cent of students passed their matric. This statistic was all the more impressive as a good proportion of the students lived in the nearby informal settlements. Even though the school is well run and has an inspirational Principal, the problems of the local community do intrude on school life. Drug dealers come through the fence and sell drugs on the sports pitches to the pupils in breaks, making some pupils reluctant to come to sports classes. The children here too were wonderful.

These were both excellent schools but, having visited them both within 24 hours, my mind inevitably turned to the inequalities that shaped the differences between the two schools. Social justice implies a concern about the extent, nature and damaging effects of inequality. But a great fallacy of social change is the assumption that because something should be done it can be done or will be done.