How old are our oldest schools, really?

 

It appears, from something I saw on Facebook, that Muir College is celebrating its 200^th anniversary this year. It will be the first South African school to do so which, obviously, makes it the oldest school in the land.

In my days as a teacher and rugby coach I visited Muir twice, once at the old school with its quaint pavilion, in Park Avenue in the middle of Uitenhage, and once at its new site up on the hill. I remember being awed by the sense of history and tradition about the place and by the generous hospitality we received.

Muir is unquestionably one of our finest schools. Whether it really is our oldest is, however, open to discussion. The Facebook post I saw included this graphic, listing the oldest 30 schools in South Africa. There are red flags all over it.

 

The age of an institution is tied to its establishment date and that is usually where things become unclear. It’s an area that I have researched quite a lot and written about from time to time. Many organisations began as something else and they can draw a clear line of succession from where they came from to where they are now. I decided, for my purposes, that a school’s founding date should be the day on which it became what it is now – when its current name was bestowed on it. Before that, it was clearly something else, and to add those years in at the beginning of its history is manipulation of the historical record.

So, is Muir really our oldest school and if not, which one is?

Here’s a blog I wrote in 2019 which outlines my views.

The announcement that Hans Coetzee will be going to Hoërskool Durbanville as a rugby coach (and that’s great news for him and the school) included the line that they are building towards a successful 200th Anniversary year in 2026.

That got some people doing arithmetic and they found it means the school was established in 1827, which puzzled a few associated with Cape Town’s SACS, the school that most people (me included) refer to as our oldest school – established in 1829.

On their website, Durbanville say they are SA’s second-oldest school – meaning that Muir is the oldest, I assume. Which makes SACS only the 3rd oldest, and that confuses matters even more.

It’s an old can of worms, one that I've researched before and I found then that the origins of most schools are shrouded in the mists of time and often a bit dodgy.

SACS is generally accepted as the oldest, but its early days were tied to UCT - they even have the same badge - and Paul Roos, similarly, was part of Stellenbosch University.

Jeppe and KES are both Milner Schools (established in 1903), yet Jeppe's Centenary was in 1989 and KES celebrated theirs in 2002, which means they both claim to have been founded prior to Lord Milners’s 1903 proclamation. They, like many of our older schools, trace their ancestry to earlier institutions (some of which can only loosely be called schools) from which they evolved.

Muir College's Website has their establishment date as 1822. But, according to Wikipaedia, Uitenhage’s first Free Government School was opened in 1822. In 1875, the school, then known as the Public Undenominational School moved to Park Avenue and in 1892 the school’s name changed to the Muir Academy. That makes them 130 years old this year, according to my reckoning.

It looks, from the history of the school on their website that Durbanville was once Pampoenkraal and a primary and high school were established there in 1827, so I suspect that they have taken that as the beginning of the current Hoërskool Durbanville.

Someone sent me a list of some 20, mainly primary, schools that were established before SACS, and Durbanville but I couldn't find any of them still operating under the names given.

It's not important really, our traditional schools have all stood the test of time.

And Hans Coetzee was, at Monument, the most successful school rugby coach Gauteng has ever seen. Durbanville will be good in 2026, not matter how old the school may or may not be.

 

The Gauteng schools are babes in arms compared to the really ones in the Cape. The older ones are proud of their ages and they all celebrate their anniversaries.

Here’s a bit I wrote about the ages, claimed and actual, about the schools up here. It illustrates how murky these waters really are:

 

JOHANNESBURG’S mining camp roots meant that it was a pretty rough town in the 1880s. It’s interesting that, along with the saloons and brothels that flourished in that roughneck environment, one of the earliest businesses to be established was a newspaper (The Star’s first edition was in February 1887) and shortly after that, the first school was opened. Within just a few years of a permanent settlement being established the Church of England clearly decided the children living in the mining camp needed a Christian education.

It’s significant that the first two schools established were both church schools, and both monastic (single sex) institutions. They are St Mary’s, founded by the church in 1888 and St John’s, established in 1898. 

There is some controversy surrounding the ages of Joburg’s other oldest schools – few of them were established with their current names, in their current locations. In most cases, the oldest among them trace their origins to some sort of educational institution established in those early days which then became something else, then something else again and, eventually, morphed into the school as it is today. Both St John’s and St Mary’ have had their current names from the start. So they can legitimately call themselves the oldest and second oldest schools in town, respectively.

Perhaps there was a need for redemption in those times, but the replication of the traditional British schooling system was obvious and intentional when the first schools were established, and it would have profound effect on education in the country in years to come.

The first of the public schools to be established in the city was Jeppe High School for boys, in 1890, they claim, and there the controversy begins. Jeppe also calls itself a Milner school (more of that later) and Lord Milner only came to South Africa in 1897. Jeppe, the school’s history recounts, had its origins in another church school, St Michael’s College. The name Jeppe first appeared in 1897 when a school called Jeppestown Grammar School was opened by the then education department. That school later split into the boys and girls high schools and the Jeppe Preparatory School, so all three of them began their history some time after 1897. 

The local German School – Deutche Schule Johannesburg (DSJ) – was also opened in 1890 and that reflected the cosmopolitan population of the miners who came here in response to the gold rush. The school was called DSJ from the beginning so on that score it is Joburg’s third oldest school. It hasn’t been operating continually, however. The school was closed from 1914 to 1918 – the First World War years – and the teachers, all German citizens, were thrown in jail. Interestingly, by 1939 and the outbreak of WW II, pro-British political sentiments were apparently no longer as strong in Johannesburg and the school remained open. The DSJ celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2015.

Lord Milner, was the British High Commissioner of  South Africa during the South African (Anglo-Boer) War, and he established a number of schools at the end of the conflict, to be run according to the British tradition, with the objective of Anglicising the newly conquered territories.

There were 23 so-called Milner Schools in all, in the end, and four of them were in the old Transvaal Republic – Pretoria Boys’ High, Potchefstroom Boys’ High, King Edward and Jeppe. That also makes KES also one of Joburg’s oldest schools. It, too, traces its origins to an educational institution that was established in 1903. It was called Johannesburg High School for Boys and was located in a disused cigar factory in the town. It later moved into a mansion called Barnato Park and was a co-ed school then. The school moved to its present site in 1904 and the name King Edward VII School came in 1910. 

A school was established in nearby Heidelberg in 1903, called Volkskool. It still exists under that name so it, legitimately, can claim to be the 2nd oldest state school in the province, after Jeppe. It’s older than KES, which only took on its current name in 1910.

Our oldest schools have the right to claim their genealogy as they see fit, of course. What can’t be denied is that the oldest schools are generally also the most successful. The traditions at the schools mentioned above stem from their earliest days and from their roots in the British educational system.

It’s ironic that some of our schools (and some in Australia, the States and Canada) are more “British” in their educational outlook than those that exist in Britain today. I remember noting some time ago that the only schools in the world that still employ the old-fashioned English cricket coaching professional are in this country.

Through most of their histories, these old schools were elitist and wholly inappropriate to the social and political realities of South Africa. The best of them have since managed to blend necessary transformation with an adherence to the best of their traditions. 

 

Sometimes the kids just wanna have fun

 

In response to my blog about the under-14 water polo tournament last week, someone anonymous posted a comment describing what he saw at a tournament in Port Elizabeth which, he said, showed that the boys often know better what is important than the adults do.

I fully agree, and I’m repeating what was said here:

Maybe you need to hear an anecdote from a recent tournament I went to in PE. It was second team tournament at Pearson High School. Obviously these are older boys (I'm not comparing it to the u14 tournament) and being a 2nd team tournament (some schools sent a 2nd and 3rd team) it was fairly relaxed but at the same time boys being boys, very competitive.

The part that will tell you that they boys themselves understand what this is all about happened during the playoffs. As you know with these tournaments all the teams play the same amount of games so eventually there are playoffs all the way down the list including the wooden spoon.

Well, the boys decided that the wooden spoon game would be turned into the highlight of the tournament they were cheering and roaring away as if this was a world cup final. It helped that the game itself went to penalties and actually lived up to the hype that the boys themselves had created. Anyway it was a fantastic advertisement for water polo and for the fact that these young men understood what in the end was important to celebrate.

Anyway my point is the kids sometimes understand things better than the adults and we should relax and let them get on with it.

What a great story.

I’ve come across instances like that one from time to time in my 40-odd years of watching school sport and they are always heart-warming and should serve as a lesson and a reminder to the adults involved that having fun is the most important aspect of playing games

The widespread introduction of lightning warning systems and the completely justified protocols which call for fields to be cleared when the siren sounds, has taken away what used to be a great source of fun in the old days – the cavorting on a flooded field after the game has been called off following a big thunderstorm. The waterlogged covers on cricket pitch would become a giant slippery-slide with players from both sides diving, aquaplaning and shrieking with delight. And it wasn’t uncommon to see both rugby teams revisit the muddiest spot on the field after a rain-drenched game for a good old fashioned wallow.

You don’t see that anymore. Everyone has to wait for the lightning all-clear now before they can go out again. There are other safety concerns, I know, and I guess the potential damage done to the fields was unacceptable, but I remember seeing teachers going on and chasing the boys away, even in the pre lighting-protocol days, They were right, I  suppose, but if you believed having fun was important, and you enjoyed seeing boys from rival schools going a little crazy together, then, like me, you would have looked on smilingly whenever it happened.

I remember another occasion when the local responsible adults came along and spoilt it for the kids. It was at a boys schools interhigh athletics meeting and the high jumpers were all at the mat, waiting to get going. The organisers suddenly called a tea break and the teachers disappeared, leaving boys waiting.

There was no crossbar up and one of the boys decided to have a practice jump anyway. Another one followed him and pretty soon they were all having a go. Then it became fun. One boy did an elaborate somersault over the imaginary bar, followed by another – backwards. Before long everyone joined in, pulling off the most outrageous, gymnastic clearances, to great laughter and applause from all the jumpers, who had forgotten by then that they were supposed to be concentrating on beating each other.

Tea-time was soon over and, you’ve guessed it, the teachers hurried over and loudly berated the boys and stopped it all.

I was there trying to get a great high jump photo, instead I got some shots of boys having the time of their lives. They soon settled down and got ready for the serious stuff. I’d wager that few of them remember the heights they cleared that day, but they probably do remember that spontaneous fantasy jump-off.

I know all about the duty of care that teachers have, and about the importance of dedication and discipline etc, but let’s remember that the kids are supposed to be having fun as well

Let the little ones learn the game without the pressure of winning

 

I’m uncoachable. I know I shouldn’t be sounding off on social media – and clever people have told me not to – but from time to time I can’t help myself.

Accordingly, I took to the keyboard to express my disapproval about the season-opening under-14 water polo in Johannesburg being run as a tournament, with semifinals and a final, and a “best of tournament” team being announced.

My views were quite solidly affirmed by a pretty heavyweight list from the educational and sporting arena, but the organiser of the tournament wasn’t very happy, and he told me so.

He was right to be cross insofar as my Facebook post never credited him, and his school, for their efforts and the sacrifices they made in organising and running what was a three-day event. He correctly pointed out that the aim was to get the kids playing again.

And they had a great weekend of healthy sport in a quite magnificent water polo facility. I spent Friday morning there and I came away heartened by the numbers and interest at this age level, and impressed by the standard of play of some of the teams.

It’s not about me, I know, but I should point out that the idea of starting the water polo lives of grade eights who had never played before with a gathering at which they played multiple games and where their coaches could teach them the game and have them put what they learnt into practice immediately, was mine. I was chairman of the then Transvaal High Schools Water Polo Association and I got the handful of schools that played the game at the time to agree to it. We held it in the little pool at Highlands North, the idea being that the players could get more of the ball in that enclosed space.

The numbers have exploded since then, polo is being played at some primary schools, and the level of coaching has improved greatly. The boys and girls I saw last Friday had no problem playing in a 25m pool. The principle behind the festival, I believe, shouldn’t change though.

That’s where I don’t agree with the organiser of last week’s tournament. It is, he told me, a continuation of the Inland Cup tournament that has been staged at Crawford College over a number of years and it is a proper tournament, running alongside a friendly festival in which “non-competitive” teams played. He then accused me creating the perception that the atmosphere was competitive whereas it was about celebrating water polo and loving being back in the pool again.

My response is that, clearly, it’s not a perception – it was a tournament with semis and a final. And that is something that cannot be good for players so young who know nothing about the game yet.

Amazingly, there was a tournament at Grey College the week before (the 2^nd week of school) that was run as a competition too. By contrast, the Ken Short under-14 tournament, a national event hosted by Jeppe, was changed in 2020 - it’s 23^rd year of existence - from a tournament to a festival because it was felt it came too early in the development of those young players – and it is in March! The headmasters of the, mainly boys-only, schools involved agreed with that.

There’s no question that even those players who played  polo in primary school still have a lot to learn and competitive matches so early are not the best place for that to happen. The schools who have polo at their bespoke prep schools stood out at the weekend – they smashed everyone (which does neither them nor their opponents any good) - but the others are going to catch up to them and their greater experience in catching, passing and shooting isn’t going, on its own, to see them through in later years.

So, well done to the organisers of last weekend’s event. You certainly did provide an opportunity for those kids to get started in water polo and, hopefully, to start loving the game. It was a privilege for them to play in what must be the best aquatic centre in the land. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to see it being used for water polo.

I just think it’s too early for the little ones to be too focussed on winning right now.

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.

2021's highights

Top 10 2021

This is the week – the one after the Khaya Majola Week – that usually I compile my list of highlights of the school sporting year that’s ended. There was no Khaya Majola festival last year -  there was no school sports year. So I couldn’t do the exercise in 2020.

That this pensioner had no “misty water-coloured memories” to look back on last year is of no consequence at all in the context of the real tragedies that unfolded in the Covid-19 pandemic. That the boys and girls never go the chance to play was, however, sad and detrimental to their physical and emotional development (although I believe they learnt all sorts of other important lessons by going through a year like that).

Thankfully 2021, though still disrupted, had a semblance of normality about it and there were events and achievements to look back on. That those happened at all has to be the biggest highlight of all and there were unsung heroes everywhere. The children kept on training, the coaches kept on coaching and the organisers went to incredible lengths to make matches happen in a regulatory environment that was changing all the time.

So, that’s highlight number one – keeping the flame burning when it would have been easier to let it go out and do other things.

1 The Saints Sportfest.

In October St Stithians hosted an abbreviated version of its annual sports festival. The codes on offer had to be adjusted – soccer and seven-a-side rugby had the biggest entries – and no spectators were allowed. There were a couple of hundred boys and girls in action, however, and they experienced some of the magic of playing in a big festival and received some of the largesse of the sponsors, Standard Bank. If the whole thing was called off again this year no-one would have blamed the school and those who worked at the festival would have had the long weekend off. They didn’t though, the kids competed and it was glorious.

2 St Benedict’s rowing 

The hardy perennial. There were no SA Schools Championships in 2021, so Bennies could not add to their tally of 27 consecutive boys section titles – the latest of which was won in 2020, just before the big lockdown. They did, however win everything they were able to compete in this year, culminating in the overall boys title at the Gauteng Champs and a resounding victory for their 1st eight at the SA Schools boat race. It’s an ongoing success story with no end in sight.

3 SA Schools Water Polo 

Our schools interprovincial tournament was one of the national events that did take place, with spectators, nogal. It was recently named the biggest youth interprovincial tournament in the world, and to organise it, and to run it successfully, under the ever-present cloud of cancellation through government intervention or a mass breakout of infections in the teams, was a huge highlight. The games were live-streamed on SuperSport Schools and there was a social media poster in Cape Town who kept me, and other lovers of the game, I’m sure, interested and engaged throughout.

4 Western Province Schools water polo

WP showed, at the tournament above, that they are still the best school water polo province, across the board. They won, for the umpteenth year in a row, the trophy for the province winning the most medals. The took nine – four gold, two silver and three bronze – in the 10 sections. Next best were Gauteng with six medals (four gold and two bronze).

5 OJ Eagles

Gauteng are still, however, the best senior mens water polo province. OJ Eagles, representing the province at the SA National Championships, won the title for the fifth year in a row, and the 16th in the last 18 times the tournament was played. Their Roarke Olver was named player of the tournament.

6 Our directors of sport

If the Covid restrictions showed us anything, it was that we don’t have to look at competitive sport in the same way as we have for the last 20 years anymore. In fact, some don’t believe things will ever be quite the same again. Take interschool fixtures. In the past the big schools believed they had to set their dates a year in advance. This year they were arranging matches on the fly, sometimes even on the day of the game. And while traditional fixtures are important, sometimes you play whoever is available. The directors of sport at the various schools are the real heroes. They worked incredibly hard to give their charges as many opportunities to play, often without knowing if the games they were arranging would actually take place. 

7 Friendly Athletics

There were no athletic interhighs in Joburg this year, but one of my sporting highlights was the Wednesday afternoon when Jeppe hosted an athletics meeting open to whoever wanted to run. A team from Springs Boys’ High even turned up, as well as individuals from the local independent schools who were only just back from their holidays. There were no medals and no points tally was kept, and in some events there were as many heats as there were runners wanting to race. Everyone tried their best and everyone enjoyed themselves. School sport’s good side, I thought.

8 Game Changers

Two game-changing developments at Joburg state schools were revealed during the year and they will make it possible for the two – King Edward and Jeppe – to compete with the well-resourced independent schools whose spending power has seen them draw ahead in recent years. The Mark Stevens Aquatic Centre at KES is an indoor pool that will allow year-round training and put the school back on the map in swimming and water polo. The funding came from a generous old boy. At Jeppe, Damascus – a state-of-the-art Swift Carbon Elite Eight boat - was bought for the school by their Jeppe Boats and Blades Trust. It cost half a million, which was raised by the trust, during the lockdown. Jeppe’s 1st eight will be able to race against the high-tech boats of the private schools from now on.

9 Golden Lions U-20s

There was no Craven Week, and very little school rugby played this year, so I had to go the next level – the SA Rugby under-20 championship, which was won by the Golden Lions, for a highlight. There was a strong Joburg schools presence in the team in including two players from Monument – Izan Esterhuizen and Henco van Wyk; two from KES – Ngia Selengbene and Connor van Buuren, and three from Jeppe – Subusiso Shongwe, Justin Kalamar and Setshaba Mokoena.

10 Two Olympians at KES

King Edward VII School had two current learners who went to Tokyo in 2021. Sprint sensation Lythe Pillay, in his matric year, was in the 4 x 400m relay team at the Olympic games in July, while16-year-old Puseletso Mabote made it into the final of the T63 100m, and competed in the long jump, at the Paraylmpics in August.

I've had a look at the new face of schooling

 

The traditional “chalk and talk” style of schooling is incredibly resilient.

 Teaching and learning in schools around the world have been carrying on in much the same way since early in the last century. The colonial empires that ruled most of the world, and imposed their schooling systems on the children in the countries that they had appropriated, are gone now, yet those educational practices remain.

 The English schooling system was transplanted into South Africa and its aim was to produce loyal subjects of the Crown and good colonial citizens of the Empire. Those intentions were well illustrated at the end of the South African (Anglo-Boer) War with the creation of the so-called Milner Schools. The British colonial authorities established a series of schools that were meant to Anglicise the children in the Transvaal and halt the influence of Afrikaans in the province.

 Those political sentiments changed – although schooling was still used for nefarious political ends by the Apartheid government – but the pedagogical methods that were used in their service are pretty much still with us.

 The idea that the teacher is the source of knowledge and teaching was about transferring that knowledge to the children was underpinned by the operational set up of schools and by their architectural design. 

 After 1948, political control passed into the hands of Afrikaners, and the church-led education that was provided to black children was replaced by State-controlled Apartheid education, but the method of teaching children remained the same.

 In the meantime, technological advances made it possible to change everything, but still nothing really changed.

 Maybe what was needed was an era-ending event (ERE), something so big and disruptive that nothing could ever be the same again, to finally free schooling from the shackles.

 As the Covid-19 pandemic surges on, with no signs of abating any time soon, there are those who are calling it an ERE. The closure of schools and the move to digital, online teaching that resulted, certainly forced educationalists to relook at the way they were doing things, and there was a lot of innovation, and a sudden awareness of what was possible with the technology that already exists.

 The students are back at school, for now, and it seems some sort of blended model, consisting of face-to-face contact and virtual classrooms will be the way that those schools who have the resources will go in the future.

There are online schools springing up – institutions that are entirely virtual – and they are certainly different. But are they the answer? What about socialisation and community interaction, what about simply hanging out with your friends?

Someone who has always been acutely aware of all these issues is Shaun Fuchs. He’s been a principal, a manager of a group of schools, and the chief executive of a private schools organisation. He’s been asking himself why this disruption can’t be used positively by re-imagining what a school looks like and re-arranging how it’s organised so that the age-old traditional model is destroyed, the new technology is used to best effect and the children are placed in the centre of it all.

He did more than ask about it; he put his reputation and livelihood on the line and built a school at which all that can happen. Last week he invited me to come and take a look at it.

It’s not completely finished – the first children arrive in January 2022 – but there’s enough already there to see that it’s going to be something very special.

Shaun has started a company called Centennial Schools – the one I went to in Sunninghill, Sandton, is the first in what he is confident will become a national chain – and he has converted an office park to become the physical site where it’s all going to happen, and appointed a principal and initial staff (it will open with Grade 7, 8 and 9 classes next year).

 The existing building has been gutted and its interior converted but, significantly, there have been no major structural alterations. “We have clear ideas about how the learning areas should operate,” he said, “but beyond that we have adapted to the available spaces. That will apply when we move into other premises around the country – no two schools will be the same.”

The architectural stereotypes of schools are a reflection of their pedagogical philosophy, Shaun believes. “The traditional classroom with its rows of desks and the teacher’s table up front reflects the power dynamics in those spaces, and the way in which students are supposed to learn. We will have learning hubs, not classrooms, there is no front or back, and there is a variety of chairs and tables which can be arranged in a way suited to the activities taking place at the time.”

The learning hubs belong to the students – they decide how they want to position themselves in them, and the teachers, who all have their own offices elsewhere, come to them. Each pair of hubs has a shared space called a collaboration hub in between them in which shared teaching and learning activities can take place.

“Our classroom design is student-centred and dynamic. Time and space are being completely reimagined and the student is at the core,” Shaun said.

There are also creative hubs designed for design and innovation, a chill zone, a cafeteria that looks like an upmarket coffee shop, a gym and a yoga studio.

The pedagogical philosophy is based on self-learning. “Our teachers are not lecturers, but rather facilitators who guide our students towards knowledge gathering, sense-making and application,” Shaun said. “Teenagers need the opportunity to exercise choice and experiment with independence in ways that ease them into the demands of early adulthood.”

That philosophy is underpinned by a state-of-the-art school management system called Engage. It manages all aspects of the school’s operation, including the presentation of the curriculum. The entire learning programme is posted online, using a blend of the best of various online learning systems, so the content is up there, and it remains there all year.

“The teachers aren’t responsible for transmitting facts and figures in class, but for ways of leading the students to discover, interpret and apply the facts for themselves,” Shaun said. “This allows for a seamless switching over to virtual teaching should the Covid-19 regulations demand it, and the students are also able to miss lessons for valid reasons without falling behind on the work.”

The ability to catch up on your own has made another unique feature possible – the opportunity to, occasionally, take a “time out”. “The stresses and pressures on teenagers can be overwhelming so we allow them to break away for a few minutes to get their balance. They have to let the teacher know, via a classmate, and they undertake to catch up on the work they have missed. Those sessions are recorded on the Engage system, so they can’t be abused, and if they happen too frequently the student is flagged and counselling assistance can be given.

A school inside an office complex doesn’t have space for sports fields, but that doesn’t mean Centennial isn’t aware of the value of extra-curricular activities. “Conditioning and exercise are taken care of in our fully equipped gym and outdoor exercise area, and we have the yoga studio. A qualified exercise scientist will run those programmes.

There will be encouragement and support for students who want to participate in traditional team and individual sports at local clubs and there are clubs catering for a wide range of those in close proximity to the school.

An extra-curricular area in which Centennial will be streets ahead of other schools is e-sports. The Sunninghill campus will have the biggest e-sports arena in the country where recreation and competitive activities will be presented, on state-of-the art equipment, under the guidance of a professional gamer.

Shaun Fuchs seemed a bit stressed at first when I met with him. Creating innovative and progressive educational places isn’t new for him – he’s been doing it for years at Crawford and Reddam House Schools – but this time it’s his own project. He explained that he has skin in the game. That means he is even more passionate and determined to make it work. He is even going to teach history next year to make sure it’s working properly from the teachers’ perspectives.

“We have appointed Nkuli Gamede as principal. He has a background in traditional boys’ schooling, but he buys into what we are trying to do completely and couldn’t be more excited about getting started,” Shaun said.

“The building is getting there, the teachers have been appointed and the classes are filling up. I can’t wait for January.”

Neither can I. Schooling needs a shake-up. Covid-19 and Shaun Fuchs have conspired that Centennial School in Sunninghill be the place where we can see what the future might look like. Maybe, in education, we are really experiencing an era-ending event.

These teams stood out

 

Here are 10 teams that stand out from the thousands I have watched over the years

Team achievements

THROUGH the mass of matches and competitions I was witness to over the 30 years I was involved in reporting on school sport there have been a number of performances that have stood out. My fading memory, I suspect, has led to me omitting some achievements that should be included in any list and I’m quite sure there were many others that I never saw. This selection of 10 consists (as is the case with all the lists I’ve compiled in the book) only of things I actually witnessed.

1 King Edward VII School in the Johnny Waite Knockout Tournament.

The Johnny Waite Knockout is the limited overs tournament contested by the schools in the Central Gauteng Lions union. It began as a 35 overs a side competition in 1974. A B section was introduced in 1981, and a C section (now for under-16 teams), in 2004. The format has been changed to T20 and the A section now doubles up as the provincial eliminator for the national Schools T20 Challenge tournament.

King Edward has dominated the competition over the years, winning the A section 20 times in its 45-year history. They have won the B section 14 times and the C section nine times. The 2010/2011 season is the one that I particularly remember. KES won all three sections that year, the first school to do so and the only one since then. They beat St Stithians in all three finals as part of what has become an ongoing fierce rivalry between the two schools.

South African captain Quinton de Kock played in that first team final, as did Keaton Jennings who was to go on to play for England. And I was at that game.

2 Bree Primary School win the Danone Nations Cup World title

In the Covid-19 disruption of 2020 it’s easy to forget that in 2009 the world was also struck by a pandemic – H1N1 (swine flu) and it too disrupted sporting activities. One event that was called off that year was the under-12 Danone Nations Cup World Finals tournament that would have been held in Sᾶo Paulo.

The Danone Nations Cup is an annual event and the 2010 world finals were scheduled to be hosted by South Africa. It was decided to stage two tournaments – 2009 and 2010 – at the same time and they were played at Tukkies in Pretoria, with the final day at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto.

Bree Primary, a small school in Mayfair, Johannesburg, had won the 2009 SA national title and were supposed to go to Brazil, instead they played in the world finals tournament at home in 2010 – and they won it.

The players were members of the Orlando Pirates Youth Academy, based at nearby Arthur Bloch Park and sent to Bree for their schooling. So, they were a selected rather that a bona fide school team, but at that age the boys were still quite green and it took a superb team effort and great coaching to see them come though three pool games, a quarterfinal, a semi and the final unbeaten.

I was at that final and to see the support that those 12 year-olds got from the Soweto home crowd was something I’ll never forget.

3 Jeppe High School for Boys Hockey 2018

I’m not a great fan of the rankings of school rugby teams that are compiled by the school sport websites, mainly because they are (outside of the top five or six) evaluating teams that don’t actually play against each other. That’s not the case with boys hockey where there are tournaments and festivals at different times of the year to which all the top schools are invited and they generally do meet up with each other every year.

So, when the Jeppe 1st hockey team ended the 2018 season ranked number one on all the sites that had published rankings, they had in fact played against all the teams in the top 12 of those lists. I still don’t really agree with the concept of rankings, but Jeppe was undoubtedly the top school in the land that year.

Their results proved that. They played 31 games in all, winning 22 and drawing nine. A number of those draws were in festival games that were of short duration and they would certainly have won some of them if they were the regulation length.

Jeppe won the Aitken Trophy – the Gauteng schools tournament – for the fourth year in a row that year (they won it again in 2019). They also won the local under-16 and under-15 tournaments in 2018.

4 Western Province Youth Rugby

SA Rugby’s demographic engineering of the teams that play in its youth weeks – the under-13 and under-18 Craven Weeks, the under-18 Academy Week and the under-16 Grant Khomo Week – definitely benefits those provinces who best unearth and develop talented players of colour and take advantage of the special talents that those players possess.

There were no youth weeks in 2020, but at the 2019 weeks the regulations required that 12 of the 23 players in each squad had to be black and in addition, the composition of starting lineups, and the numbers on the field at any time were stipulated.

There is a long rugby tradition among black people in the Cape and Western Province has worked hard to use that to its advantage. Its township and rural development programmes, and the recruitment of talented players into its top rugby schools has paid dividends to the extent that WP sides are now chosen entirely on merit, and yet almost always exceed the compulsory quotas. This has led to them winning the main game at the under-18 Craven Week on four recent occasions. They have been in the showpiece fixtures of the other three youth weeks regularly in last few years and have won those games more than any other province.

In 2017 the Golden Lions won the Craven Week main game and, significantly, the black players in their ranks, on bursaries at schools like King Edward and Jeppe, played a major role in their success.

5 King Edward VII Rugby 2017

The 2017 King Edward VII School 1st rugby team didn’t have an unbeaten season. They lost to Monument - I was at that game - and two matches were declared non-contests – the rained off game against Pretoria Affies, and the away game at Maritzburg College which didn’t happen because the KES busses were turned around because a cloud of toxic fumes from a rubbish dump fire had descended on Pietermaritzburg.

There have been four unbeaten 1st XV seasons at KES: 1968, 1973, 1974 and 1978. The 2017 team don’t make that list, but few would dispute that it was among the very best produced by the school. Those unbeaten teams played fewer games, generally and their fixture lists included matches against Joburg schools mainly, many of whom no longer play rugby. The class of 2017 had to take on schools like Wynberg Boys’ High, Rondebosch, Waterkloof, Affies, Monument, Bishops and Hoërskool Bellville.

They beat all of those, except for Monument, who beat them 24-19 in a game that the Reds dominated everywhere except on the scoreboard. KES were up at half time against Affies and, I thought, in with a pretty good chance of recording their first win over them, when that game was called off under the lightning safety protocols. KES won the first leg of their double header against Maritzbug College, at home, quite comfortably and although it might have been trickier away from home in the second. It’s unlikely that they would have allowed themselves to lose the last game of that great season.

In the end, their record read 14 wins and one loss, with those two undecided games. But it was also the style of those victories that made me, among many other neutral schoolboy rugby fans, try to be there every time they played. There was plenty of flair and adventure, flowing from disciplined ferocity up front.

It was a team performance for the connoisseurs, and the individual players got their rewards too. Seven of them made the Golden Lions Craven Week team and a further 10 were in one of the two Academy Week teams that the Lions fielded that year. Four were selected for SA Schools: Keegan Glade, Yanga Hlalu, Kennedy Mpeku and Travis Gordon. Gordon captained both the Lions and SA Schools teams.

6 St Stithians T20 Cricket

In 2012 Cricket South Africa introduced a national T2O competition - the Schools T20 Challenge, sponsored in the beginning by Coca-Cola. Knockout competitions are played in all the affiliated provinces, with the winners playing off in their franchises to get to six schools who play at a national finals weekend.

In 2019 St Stithians College, representing the Lions franchise, became the first team to win the national title four times when they beat the Dolphins representatives, St Charles College, at Tukkies in Pretoria. They had previously taken the title in 2014, 2016 and 2017.

Saints emerged as a major force in cricket in Joburg under the leadership of director of Cricket Wim Jansen who has a philosophy that the key is to play as many matches as possible. In addition to their traditional fixtures against the other boys schools, they play games just about every day of the week, against whatever quality opposition that can be lined up. In the run up to the T20 Challenge, many of those are 20-over encounters and the extra experience has served them well.

There is good coaching as well, of course, including the services of Yorkshireman Peter Stringer, one of the few old-style English cricket professionals still working at a school in South Africa.

Saints were back at the national Schools T20 Challenge finals in early 2020 – one of the few big events that was played before the Covid-19 pandemic closed down sport – but they didn’t make it into the main game.

CSA has since announced that they are abandoning the franchise system, so the format of this competition will have to change in the future, but you can bet on St Stithians being a major factor in whatever the new arrangement might be.

7 Golden Lion Craven Week 2017

The Golden Lions Craven Week team of 2017 was something special. It won the unofficial title, beating KwaZulu-Natal 45-18 main game at St Stithians that year, to become the first Lions team to do so since 2005. Lions teams had made the main game five times in the 12 years in between, but lost every time.

Western Province had come to the week as favourites, but they were held to a draw by the hosts on the opening day which effectively ruled them out of the running because the fixtures committee will always go for the home province to play in the main game when there is nothing to choose between them and another team.

The success of the Golden Lions team, as is always the case at Craven Week these days, was largely based on the quality of the players of colour in its ranks. Many of the stars in the excellent King Edward side that year were black, and they were there, as were, as were a few from Parktown, Jeppe and St Stithians. That the Lions were able to meet the compulsory demographic requirements without having to resort to “quota” selections definitely gave them an edge. 

That Lions team was full of stars. No fewer than nine of them made the SA Schools team and most of those also went on the play for the national under-20 team. Their captain, Travis Gordon, captained the SA Schools team and the under-20s and he, along with several of the others, has played senior provincial rugby since.

8 St Alban’s Rowing 2015

Rowing at St Alban’s College is an ongoing success story. The team is small and a decision was taken to keep it that way, only entering a limited number of races at regattas and at the SA Championships. Their boats are all set up for sculls – two oars per rower – so they only enter half of the races at each event. They usually win them, and are regularly the top sculling club at the Gauteng and SA School Champs.

The one occasion on which they do participate in a 1st eight race, which is a sweep oar event, is at the annual Schools Boat race on the Kowie River at Port Alfred. They borrow a boat, get a crew of eight together out of their top scullers for a few practice sessions, and take on the top schools in the country.

In 2015, in a boat loaned from the University of Pretoria, they actually won the boat race. It’s a head regatta, which means crews race off head-to-head and the last two standing meet in the final. So it wasn’t a fluke that they came out on top, rather a reflection of their superb fitness levels and natural ability over two days of racing.

There are those who say that the only way that St Benedict’s 26-year winning streak at the SA Schools Championships can be broken would be for St Alban’s to increase their numbers and enter the single oar races as well. They insist that they have no interest in doing that, but if they did, their proximity to the best training facilities at Roodeplaat dam, along with the rowing talent that they attract, might just do it.

9 St John’s Rugby 2019

It was impossible not to enjoy watching the 2019 St John’s College rugby team play.

They came within a whisker of being unbeaten against Joburg opposition – they lost to Jeppe by a single point early in the season and drew with King Edward and were comfortably the better side in both those games.

They also lost to St Andrew’s College and to Kingswood at the Grey High Festival, but they won all their other games, and that included wins over fierce local rivals St Stithians, and over St David’s, St Alban’s and St Andrew’s School. They were also victorious over Michaelhouse in that annual fixture.

More important than the results of the games, though, was the manner in which they played them. In an era when the majority of schools are adopting a more conservative style, turning school matches – especially those against traditional rivals – into mini Test matches, St John’s played with a spirit of adventure and abandon that made them a joy to watch.

I watched them play as often as I could that year and was never disappointed. Of course, they had the personnel to play that way. They had speedy wingers who were excellent finishers, skillful centres, a flyhalf with and educated boot and forwards who were able to win them enough ball to play with.

The main thing was that coaches Gerrie Visser and Peter Murison allowed the players to express themselves and adapted their game plan to their abilities. The result was a breath of fresh air in a season characterised by stolid, subdue and penetrate rugby.

10 Wits Varsity Cup 2020

University rugby doesn’t really belong in a collection of school sport memories, I know, but so many of the players involved in the Varsity Cup are ones that I saw at school level and, besides, I’ve never denied being a fan of the Varsity Cup competition, and of Wits in particular, and what they achieved in 2020, before the season was brought to a halt by the Covid lockdown, was just so remarkable.

I’ve been watching Wits play for years. I saw them relegated from the Pirates Grand Challenge, the local 1st league, I saw the club coming close to closing down, I watched them regain 1st league status and, in 2019 saw them win the Pirates Grand Challenge title - the Golden Lions club league - under coach Hugo van As.

That form carried on into the Varsity Cup of 2020. When the competition was stopped they had played five games, won four and drew one. They had beaten UCT, UJ, Pukke and Tukkies and were lying third in the league with three games to go. They would have had to face Shimlas and Maties still, but the way they were going they were a shoo-in for the knockout stages of the tournament.

Wits was excluded from the first Varsity Cup lineup in 2008 and were included in 2011 when the league was enlarged. They never won a game in 2012 and 2013 and were relegated to the B Section Varsity Shield in 2014. In 2016 they won the Shield and they were back in the Cup competition in 2017.

The academic entry requirements at Wits are more stringent than those of some at the other institutions. They don’t offer short, low intensity diplomas that rugby players can enrol for. All their bursary recipients have to meet the entry criteria for degree courses, and they have to pass to keep on playing.

With that in mind, and considering the state that rugby at Wits was in a few years ago, the Wits 2020 Varsity Cup campaign certainly makes my top team performances list.