The news comes just as PEP opens a further two academies in Soweto and Berea this week, bringing the total number of Student Prince Academies (SPAs) to six and the number of Grade 4 learners enrolled to around a thousand children. PEP People Support Director, Estelle Morkel says: “The fact that these results are so good is very encouraging and we would open more academies if we could.”
Overall, the SPAs teach the essential building blocks of education – words and numbers. It is well documented that if a child falls behind in the early school years, this gets exponentially worse as the child – or if the child – goes through school. When the initiative was launched last year, the Department of Education endorsed it and stated that this kind of model should be replicated in as many provinces as possible. PEP will encourage other corporations to support the initiative in the hope that more funding will be made available so that many more academies can be opened.
The biggest challenge facing the Government and the education sector is to dramatically improve core performance and to increase the average performance in South African schools. The problems are often attributed to poor transition from mother tongue to English at Grade 4 level and this is when many learners, who find it difficult to adapt to the transition, fall behind and then leave school prematurely.
For this reason, The Student Prince Academy curriculum was designed to support this critical change: to help the learners with homework, extra literacy, numeracy tuition and life skills training. The curriculum is run in the six schools from 14h30 until 16h30 on three afternoons a week. All the children are given a snack (eg a sandwich, a piece of fruit and a fruit juice) before their lessons start.
PEP MD, George Steyn says: “Most of the academy learners are children of people who cannot afford school fees at all or any additional education. We’re not only helping to keep those kids at school and off the streets, but we’re also providing a safe and caring environment for free supplementary education and other activities with the aim that in the long term they’ll keep on attending school.”
PEP is investing R4.5-million in the project this year. Advisor to Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor, Martin Mulcahy adds: “Too many companies just throw money at CSI projects. However, PEP has identified a need and has piloted this properly to make sure the Student Prince Academies work. This is also an example of how Private Public Partnerships should work."
A free supplementary education pilot initiative launched a year ago has been judged a huge success. The Student Prince Academies, which are run within existing schools, have given hundreds of Grade 4 school kids after-school training in numeracy, literacy and life skills. Average improvement is 20 percentage points for numeracy and 29 for literacy (the target was 10 percentage points for both). An evaluation study also reveals that learners enrolled in the PEP academies have performed significantly better than those not enrolled in both learning areas. Children enrolled performed better at the end of Grade 4 than they did in Grade 3. The results were assessed, monitored and released by an outside research and monitoring company on behalf of PEP, which funds the academies, and Social Innovations, which runs them.
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