Supporting Quality Basic Education to Learners in Low Income Communities

Acorn Education

Acorn Education supports no-fee public schools to provide high quality education. As a school operating partner in the Western Cape Collaboration schools project, Acorn provides an all-encompassing support to its schools. This support includes all aspects of day-to-day management from financial and operational matters to instructional leadership, educator development and learner enrichment.

Acorn’s whole-school approach includes

a) extended school days,
b) online personalised learning programmes,
c) holistic learner development,
d) school leadership and teacher development and
e) governance and operations.

For more information refer to https://acorneducation.org.za/.

ARK (Education Partnership Group) Collaboration Schools Policy Development Project (ARK)

ARK has submitted a signed Memorandum of Agreement with the Western Cape Department of Education for the development and implementation of an operational framework to enable the implementation and sustainability of the Collaboration Schools programme. The project outcomes include (a) Clarifying roles and responsibilities for the full lifecycle of Collaboration Schools and establishing the programme within the WCED; (b) The appointment, training and establishment of a capable WCED-led team to implement the Collaboration Schools Operational Model; (c) The design and establishment of systems that provide the WCED of what is working and why, to inform WCED policy and strategy to improve education delivery in the Western Cape; and (d) establishing a clear pipeline of funding sources and sustainable financial model for long-terms support, especially for the most disadvantaged schools.

ARK (Education Partnership Group) Strengthen the Education System (ARK)

ARK’s long-term ambition in South Africa is to strengthen the national education system through significant reform and effective policy implementation. They believe the best way to achieve this ambition is to cultivate trusted relationships with provincial education departments and demonstrate their credibility by delivering contextually relevant and evidence-based policy reform and implementation that significantly improves the quality of education in these provinces. EPG plans to work with the National and Provincial Education Departments to strengthen their monitoring, assessment and accountability measures. EPG also want to assist to develop principal qualification requirements, as well as a competency-based assessment framework to substantially enhance the principal appointment process. EPG plans to do reform work on quality and access in the ECD sector.

Community Keepers

Community Keepers delivers school-based mental health and social services to learners from marginalised communities. The objectives of this project are to provide counselling and therapeutic support to learners; to develop learners’ social and personal skills to deal with everyday life and to make informed life choices and to equip teachers and parents with the skill to fulfil their responsibilities towards learners. Millennium Trust is supporting the Community Keepers offices at Apex High and Apex Primary Schools (no-fee public schools situated in Eerste River, outside Cape Town).

For more information refer to https://communitykeepers.org/.

Public Schools Partnerships Programme (PSP)

PSP as a collaborative programme between government, donors and non-profit school operating partners, aims to achieve a system-wide improvement in the quality of public schools servicing children from poor communities by giving selected government schools the same level of leadership and management flexibility that is accorded to independent schools; harnessing strong managerial resources that currently reside outside of the public education system, and concentrating those resources in underperforming schools and in schools serving marginalise communities and embedding a robust accountability framework so that government is able to track the performance of PSP schools. The group of funding organisations entered into a memorandum of agreement with the Western Cape Education Department to pilot “Collaboration Schools”, that will strengthen the quality of public schools, demonstrate effective models public-schools improvement, strengthen public school governance models, develop educators, and implement interventions to improve the quality of public education for learners from the poorest communities in the Western Cape.

For more information refer to https://dgmt.co.za/tag/public-school-partnership/.