The unique stories that make the top schools tops

Towards the end of my time at the Star I became involved in producing a supplement each February, celebrating the achievements of schools that excelled in the matric exams at the end of the year before.

We called in Excellence in Education - it used to be Top Schools, but the top schools it featured asked for the change as they didn’t want to flaunt – and it was unashamedly advertorial, which meant if you paid for an advertisement in it, you were guaranteed editorial space.

I thought of it in the last two weeks when 2021’s results were released and the private schools, mainly, went onto Facebook en masse to publish their astonishing achievements.

And they were homogenously astonishing. 100% pass rates don’t even warrant a mention, 100% university entrance rates are a given and everyone, it seems, got one or many more distinctions.

That the schools went to so much trouble in the presentation of their social media posts was significant, it showed that the print media is no longer an option. My Excellence in Education supplement is long gone, along with the rest of what was my Star of those days.

It occurred to me though, that those results were just about identical in all the schools. Every one passed, everyone got distinctions, everyone is brilliant. The schools could have cut and pasted from each other and no-one would have been the wiser.

I tend to see the point of Professor Jonathan Jansen, who asked in a recent column what the point of writing exams at all was, if you know everyone is going to get practically nothing wrong. Wouldn’t it be better to develop some other end-of-school assessment method, one that better evaluates readiness and potential ahead of tertiary study and the world of work?

It is what it is for now, however, and it’s a big marketing exercise for the schools – private and public.

Which brings me back to that supplement I used to do. In the beginning we used to ask schools to send editorial in to us. Speak of cutting and pasting! They all said the same things: we have the top marks, best sports teams and the greatest cultural programmes.

That’s when the writer I used to assist me at the time, the very smart Eulalia Snyman, came up with the idea of telling the schools that we didn’t want anything from them. We will speak to them ourselves and look for their unique stories. There is always a unique story, Eulalia knew, and she had a nose for them.

So we set up interviews and, sure, we came up with the things that made those great schools great – the special things that separated them from the rest and from each other.

I no longer operate in that world, so I’m not up to date with what happens there, but since retirement I spend a couple of days a week at Jeppe High School for Boys and while working on publicising their 100% pass rate and multiple distinctions last week I came across their unique story, one of them anyway.

They run a programme they call Bravehearts that singles out boys, at the beginning of Grade 12, who are in danger of failing at the end of the year, and gets on their case. It’s run by David Williams, an author and former journalist, who rekindled his love for teaching late in life and he monitors those boys and leads interventions, in and out of the classroom, aimed at getting them to pass. It worked in 2021 – it hasn’t always, it never will – but it’s something special. And it’s part of Jeppe’s unique character.

I trawled my memory for some of the other special things we came across in those days. The unique things that made the top schools extraordinary. Here are a few that come to mind, in no order and without pretending to include all of them.

St Mary’s runs one of the biggest Saturday School programmes in town. Their teachers teach hundreds of township kids in their spare time. It’s often the only effective teaching those children get, which is a story for a different time, and it gets most of them matric passes in the end. And teams of St Mary’s girls are there each Saturday making tea and sandwiches and serving it to those learners in their breaks.

The St Stithians campus has been declared a biodiversity hotspot. Apart from the wetlands, stream and forests which are protected and preserved, great effort has been made to make everything “green”. Recycling, alternative energy usage and conservation are part of everything they build and do. The children are being brought up in that environment and are being taught to believe in it. That’s special, and important.

I’d go to Saheti School every year. It’s one of my favourites. The unique and special thing about it is that it absolutely knows what its focus is. It’s about Hellenism and Greek culture, and academic excellence (the Saheti results were as brilliant as all the others on Facebook) and about educating children accordingly. Of course its also holistic and everything else is offered too, but there is a focus they stick to. I spoke to the director of sport there, Werner Janse van Rensburg, a former provincial and Varsity Cup rugby coach, who told me he has learned to reformulate his definition of winning. “We compete wherever we can, but we know what we are trying to achieve,” he said. There are lots of victories of a different kind along that path, I’m sure.

This is getting too long. So, briefly: at St John’s everyone, staff and learners, have to do a set number of hours of community service every year; at Roedean the norms and values of raising young ladies in the turn-of-the-century “English” way still loom large everywhere; and Brescia House is a Microsoft in Education accredited school where the innovative use of technology is prized above just about everything else.

Those were the stories we told. Those are what made those schools stick out in their world of universal excellence. Sadly, with the demise of print media, we don’t get to read many of them anymore. But they are there – behind the social media postings.