PEP OPENS MORE ACADEMIES FOR GRADE 4 SUPPLEMENTARY EDUCATION

04 June 2009

The Student Prince Academy, a free supplementary education initiative launched and piloted by PEP last year, has been judged a huge success. Due to the good results, PEP is investing R4.5million into the project this year and opened two more academies: Roseneath Primary School in Berea and Ebuhleni Primary School in Soweto.

Last year, about 640 learners enrolled in the academies improved their numeracy scores by an average of 20% and literacy by an average of 29%.  A monitoring and evaluation study also revealed that learners enrolled in the PEP academies performed significantly better at school than those not enrolled.     

The Academies, run by social investment consultancy Social Innovations within existing schools, are giving a thousand Grade 4 learners after-school core competence tuition in numeracy, literacy and life skills - the necessary building blocks of education. The first four academies were opened last year in two Gauteng schools (Tembisa and Daveyton in Ekurhuleni) and two Western Cape schools (Walter Teka & Liwa School in Nyanga and the Tygersig Primary school in Tygerberg).

The biggest challenge facing the education sector is to dramatically improve core performance in literacy and numeracy 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 (e.g. 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 supplementary education and other activities with the aim that in the long term they’ll keep on attending school.”

When the initiative was launched last year, the Department of Education (DoE) endorsed it fully and said this kind of model should be replicated in as many provinces as possible. The DoE also stated that, rather than throwing money at an arbitrary corporate social investment project, PEP had identified a real need and then piloted an initiative to address that need and in order to ensure that it worked.