Residents of St Helena Bay this week took a bold stance to protest what they describe as the Western Cape Department of Education’s lacklustre approached to their efforts to see to it that a high school is built in this coastal town.
Currently most learners have to travel to neighbouring towns by bus.
Though one can sympathise with the challenges and frustration these residents and learners face, taking learners out of school even for a day also doesn’t seem like a well thought-through strategy because it is again the very learners’ education that is being advocated for, that is disrupted.
Looking at statistics however, there is no doubt that there is a massive gap between the number of high schools and primary schools nationally. According to Statista, as of 2024, the total number of schools in South Africa was more that 24 800. This should however be put in context against the current population of 64 million (with a 1% growth annually) of which the estimated number of children under 18 years was 21 million. More than half of these schools were in KwaZulu-Natal (6 030), the Eastern Cape (5 295) and Limpopo (3 823) with the Western Cape recording 1 149 public schools of which 384 were high schools.
This data has been supported by various media reports over the years suggesting that there is only one high school for every three primary schools in the Western Cape.
Yet the Western Cape recorded a number of 385 454 enrolled high school learners in 2022, but 1,2 million primary school learners.
With very few high schools being built in the Western Cape since, how is the education sector supposed to cope with learner admissions and overcrowding in school without risking even higher school dropout rates?
Provincially, residential and commercial development is booming but what is being done to ensure proper education infrastructure to accommodate these growing communities – a problem that cannot only rest on the shoulders of the WCED, but should be a collective concern by each department and government as a whole as it affects each link of society.
