PEP WINS TOP SOCIAL INVESTMENT AWARD 
30 October 2009

Last night the PEP Student Prince Academy, an initiative of PEP and Social Innovations, was commended as the leading project in the education category in the Mail & Guardian Investing in the Future Awards.  This category received the bulk of the entries to these annual corporate social investment awards.  The project “is changing lives by thinking out of the box,” the judging panel said. 

PEP’s flagship CSI project is a free supplementary education initiative for Grade 4 learners, has proven effective in building the core competence of learners in this transition year.  Tests show that learners enrolled in the programme have improved numeracy scores by an average of 20 and literacy scores by an average of 29 percentage points.  The monitoring study also showed that children enrolled in the programme performed better than those not enrolled at the end of Grade 4 by as much as 45%. 

The academies are held within existing schools and give over 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 in 2008 a further two in 2009 with two more are planned in 2010.

The biggest challenge faced by Government and the education sector is to dramatically improve core performance and to increase the average performance in South African schools.  If children do not grasp the basic concepts of numeracy and literacy at a young age, it is very difficult for them to progress to senior school and tertiary education. The problems are often attributed to poor transition from mother tongue to English at Grade 4 level.  The Student Prince Academy curriculum was designed to support this critical transition.

PEP MD, George Steyn says:  “We’re thrilled to have been recognised – alongside Social Innovations – for this project.  We’re proud to have developed such a workable and successful model. Most of the academy learners are children of people who cannot afford school fees at all or any additional education, we’re proud to be able to give them this tuition, an afternoon snack and a reason to stay at school longer in the afternoons.”
Kimon Phitidis MD of Social Innovations says that the academies are also helping to drive positive change in teaching and learning methodologies in the hosting schools.  Teachers and managers from host schools provide extensive training and learning support methodologies.

The Student Prince Academy initiative is endorsed by the Department of Education (DoE), which states that this kind of model is a perfect example of a Public Private Partnership and should be replicated in as many provinces as possible. Phitidis adds: “The programme was designed as a social franchise to be easily taken up by any other institution.  Because it is a workable model and because PEP cannot alone afford to roll it out to as many schools as it would like to, the initiative may be replicated and adopted by any other ‘sponsor’ wanting to do good in the educational sector.”