Designing public education for the future in SA — Collaboration Schools point the way

The matric class of 2025 at Silikamva High School brought joy and pride to the community of Imizamo Yethu in Hout Bay. The school achieved a 100% pass rate, with three-quarters of matric pupils obtaining a bachelor’s pass. Just six years ago, the pass rate was just 40%.

Silikamva is a Collaboration School in the Western Cape, in which the principal and staff work together with a school operating partner – in this case Common Good – to improve pupil outcomes and wellbeing. The other mainstream high schools taking part in this provincial initiative, Apex Eersteriver and Kraaifontein, obtained pass rates of 98% and 89% respectively, the latter 32 percentage points up from 2023.

These results were not achieved by weeding out the weakest pupils before their final Grade 12 exams to exaggerate the successes of the school. On the contrary, these schools believe in the worth of every child and try to provide each one of them with the fullest educational experience possible.

This is achieved through an infusion of strong management practices and educational enrichment by a nonprofit operating partner, working together with the principal and staff. The school community (parents, teachers and pupils) and the operating partner are equally represented in the school governing body (SGB), and the provincial department of education permits more flexibility in the appointment of teachers and the use of public funds. This latitude is offered in return for stronger outcomes-based accountability. What counts as success is that pupils thrive – not strict compliance with standard administrative practices.

Critics of Collaboration Schools say that they undermine parental control of the SGB and open public schools to commercial profiteering. They are unpersuaded by the fact that the entire parent body decides if and when the school should join or leave the programme, or that communities themselves opted for 50-50 partnership so that operating partners can’t make the excuse that they lack the power to co-create change.

Those detractors point to countries where fly-by-night profiteers provide trash-schooling to the poorest children, or where publicly funded private operators cherry-pick the brightest children for admission to boost their results. Certainly, these are valid global concerns as education becomes increasingly commodified. However, they don’t apply to Collaboration Schools, which are based on principles of nonprofit support to no-fee public schools offering non-selective admission to children within their catchment areas.

The ways we think are changing

Collaboration Schools show how the wider capabilities of communities can be harnessed for the benefit of education. This is vital as the wider role of teachers is changing, from telling children what to remember to teaching them how to think – from conveyors of a prepackaged curriculum to connecting them to diverse and dynamic sources of knowledge. As discrete and disconnected content knowledge gives way to more integrated and applied learning over the next decade and as pupils increasingly draw on the vast digital memory banks of the internet, how we think will change. Our boxed and mechanistic thinking will give way to more fluid “dialectical reasoning” where ideas are constantly tested and refined. Education will become more distributed and less bound by institutional walls. Schools will be viewed less as bastions of learning – insulated and aloof – and more as community incubators for social and business enterprise, as local nodes in global networks of knowledge.

Effective learning will require facilitated access to open knowledge networks and routine interaction with social innovators, environmental problem-solvers, entrepreneurs and future employers. At the same time, artificial intelligence will continue to blur the origins and veracity of information, and the ability of pupils to distinguish between objectively justifiable views and opinion will prove as foundational as literacy and numeracy.

Schools must evolve with the times

In this fast-changing environment, school management and governance systems will also need to change. School executives and SGBs must continue to ensure that external ideas and influences are negotiated in a safe and nurturing environment for children. But the notion that principals, parents and teachers could hold all the expertise to run a school – that they should not draw on the strategic thinking and decision-making capabilities of others both in and beyond their communities – is already becoming archaic.

Sceptics will challenge this futuristic vision and bring us down to Earth with the realities of residual pit toilets, dilapidated schools and foundational failings in numeracy and literacy. But the future is now, and public schooling could fall increasingly behind the pace of real education unless they prime themselves for these new ways of learning. As Silikamva High has shown, smart management can tackle basic shortcomings and seize new learning opportunities at the same time.

Wealthier schools are already adapting, while poorer children continue to be excluded from rich, dynamic and fast-paced learning environments for reasons relating to both technological access and slow processes of change in the public sector. This is where a mobilised civil society can help – not to fill gaps left by the state, nor as a low-cost alternative to commercial providers, but as active collaborators in innovation, educational enrichment and the promotion of equity.

With these considerations in mind, the South African Schools Act and its attendant regulations should be revised to ensure that public schools have as much space to innovate as independent schools, both through curricular and institutional redesign. Doing this would include pupils in public schools in the global explosion of knowledge.

The future of Collaboration Schools is now in the hands of the Supreme Court of Appeal, after the Western Cape High Court dismissed Equal Education and teacher trade union Sadtu’s objections to 2018 amendments to the Western Cape Provincial Education Act, which enables the implementation of Collaboration Schools.

The outcome of the appeal should be known in the next few months. It will provide a clear indication as to whether there is space for new ideas in public education that could radically improve pupil outcomes, or whether the walls of an institution designed for the industrial age will close in on poorer children, just as their networked wealthier peers explore information and opportunities without horizon. DM

David Harrison is CEO of the DG Murray Trust.