Vusi Nyhila didn’t get the best start in life. Like many South African children, his family has struggled with poverty.
“I’ve been raised by a single mother; I’ve got six siblings and it was quite hard for her to do anything on her own,” he says. As a last resort, his mother placed him and his siblings into care. For Nyhila, that meant a bunk at the Rhema Children’s Village in Yeoville, Johannesburg.
Despite this less than ideal situation, his prospects look bright. Through good fortune and goodwill, his mother also managed to get him sponsored to attend Dominican Convent School, a low-fee independent school in a rundown part of the Johannesburg inner city.
The ageing buildings of the small Catholic school at the end of a non-descript residential street on the edge of Jeppestown belie the warm familiarity and the wealth of opportunity that Dominican offers children like Nyhila.
Ten years ago, at age eight, he entered grade two at Dominican, having never attended pre-school and having skipped grade one. Today the 18-year-old, who came through grade 11 with good grades, has just entered matric.
“I did quite well in grade 11 but with matric I want to do really well,” he says. ” We’re growing up and getting to a point where we can support ourselves and help our younger siblings, and be role models.”
Inner-city struggles
Nyhila’s story is not unique at Dominican. About 10% of its student body comes from vulnerable backgrounds — orphanages, places of safety or refugee centres. But then, that’s the way the school intended it to be.
“That’s what we’re really aiming to do at the school,” says headmaster Mike Thiel. “To create an environment where a rich mix of children are able to come to school together, teaching them that irrespective of background, they all have similar aspirations, they all want to achieve at the same level. And they can,” he says.
Other Dominican students pay either a subsidised fee or the full fee. Many of those from wealthier families contribute a bit extra to the school each month, to cross-subsidise their sponsored classmates. And where there are shortfalls, the school approaches individual and corporate donors for aid.
Dominican has a particularly long school day — students are lined up for class at 7.30am and the last of the extra-curricular activities finishes just before 4pm. When the last bell rings at Dominican, its 400 high school students stream towards the gates in their blue striped blazers. Some are picked up by parents in flashy BMWs, others by parents in dented Nissans. Many walk home or hail a taxi.
Because of its location, Dominican attracts a wide mix of children. Its students come from the townships and from the inner city. Some come from across the border, from nearby Botswana or far-flung Malawi. “Last year we had 21 home languages at the school,” says Thiel.
And yet its matric pass rate for the Independent Examination Board (IEB) exam was an admirable 98,4%. Among the matriculants was a boy who had fled the Democratic Republic of Congo at the age of five and literally walked to Johannesburg in search of asylum.
Building a strong school
There can be no easy comparisons between an independent school like Dominican and a government school. Dominican is one of fewer than 2 000 independent schools in the country, a fraction of which write the IEB exam. Still, there are lessons to be learned from the school, which not only achieves well academically, but also produces confident, grounded students.
When the IEB matric results were released earlier this year, Simon Lee, spokesperson for the Independent Schools Association of South Africa, said the key to success at most independent schools is stability, time on task and good teaching.
“Good resources and teaching in a stable environment can produce exceptional results. It’s a model we can look at and replicate some elements of in the state sector,” he says.
So what could a state school learn from a place like Dominican? It is better resourced than most public schools, but is by no means on the same level as the Jeppe Boys and Parktown High School for Girls in Johannesburg. Soccer and swimming are accommodated at public venues. Science students work out of a converted classroom that serves as a science lab.
But though top-flight public and private schools alike will tout facilities like large swimming pools, state-of-the-art gyms and climbing walls as differentiating features among their offerings, these are not necessarily what make for good education.
From an education point of view, the most important resource you could ask for is a well-trained and dedicated teacher.
Ruksana Osman, head of Wits University’s School of Education, says well-trained teachers, quality school leadership, solid support for students, and a student’s own orientation towards learning are key factors that influence academic achievement at schools. And then there’s the principal.
“How the principal takes on management as well as the intellectual tasks of learning is a key factor in the success of the school. When you drill down, you will find a principal and management team that’s involved, hands-on, in running the school and dealing with parents,” says Osman.
A committed staff
At Dominican, school management boils down to the headmaster and his core of five senior staff. When it comes to recruiting new teachers, they look for a particular type of person. Teachers that fit in at Dominican, says Thiel, “realise that they’re not there to teach maths and science, they’re there to teach children”.
“We’re about creating an aspirational school, and to do that we’ve got to have teachers who aspire to greater things,” he says.
Thiel himself has taught at well-known and well-financed schools across the country, from St George’s Grammar School in Cape Town to Clifton College in Durban. But teaching at Dominican has provided new challenges and also new rewards. And the biggest challenge by far, is language.
To bridge the language gap, the school offers targeted interventions for children who do not speak English as a home language — one-on-one language tutoring or teaching in small groups.
But what really makes Dominican tick is what Thiel calls “the circle of care”. “It’s a matter of realising the world is not a simple place for children to grow up in, particularly not when they don’t have a ready, nurturing family behind them,” he says.
Many of the parents who send their children to Dominican are nurturing ones, but they are not without the everyday stresses of working South Africans. Long working hours and long commutes mean less quality time to spend with children in the evenings.
“A school like ours needs to bridge the gap, particularly during the week,” he says.
Here education is more than just good grades and involvement in sports and activities. “The world that we’re in, whether you are wealthy or poor, needs a huge amount of resilience and children need to feel that they are not out there on their own, they need to feel that circle of care,” says Thiel.
Practical but aspirational
The world is not a simple place for Matshidiso Nhlapo. When her mother fell ill with cancer in 2002 the school suggested she stay at the boarding school, and she was offered regular counselling.
“I felt like I couldn’t talk about it,” says the reserved matric student. “I felt my father was very sad and the only way I could make him happy was if I seemed happy, so I always had a smile on my face. Even when they told me my mom died, I didn’t cry. I held my aunt and said everything is going to be okay. And I was nine at the time.”
“Through the counselling, that was the only time I ever spoke about what I was going through.”
Nhlapo hopes to go to university next year. “First I have to get a scholarship, of course,” she says. She hasn’t decided what to apply for yet but knows that her decision will have to be a practical one.
“I have to go into a career that I’m guaranteed a job in … My [stepmother] and my father are unemployed, so for my younger sister to go to school, I have to have a job for that,” she says.
Nhlapo says she’s grateful for the high expectations her teachers have had of her. “They push us, which I think is needed because if we’re not pushed then we have nothing besides our dreams … The school logo says everything, ‘At Dominican, you can’, and that’s what they try to enforce in all of us. We can achieve good things, we should just push ourselves to get there,” she says.