Christmas came early this year for a group of threeto five-year-old children in Farmerfield. Before you can
peek into the pre-fab classroom, you’ll hear the group singing Jingle Bells at the top of their voices.
Christmas came early this year for a group of threeto five-year-old children in Farmerfield. Before you can
peek into the pre-fab classroom, you’ll hear the group singing Jingle Bells at the top of their voices.
While preschools are dying out in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape largely because of urbanisation, a recently initiated pre-school experiment at Farmerfield Intermediate School just outside Salem is working like a charm.
“A circle is like a ball,” chant the group of 16 children huddled together. “A square has four sides. A rectangle has four sides: two wide and two long.” The teacher holds up a poster with shapes on the other
side of the class.
The group scuttles around wooden desks and red plastic chairs to join her. One boy is wearing a uniform, a loose shoelace dangling behind him.
Another sports a turquoise sweater. Now the children are marching around the tables and chairs chanting, “Left right, left right, off to school we go.”
Their teacher stops them at the traffic light poster and asks, pointing to the top circle, “What colour is this?” “Four!” shouts one of the children.
The teacher repeats the question in isiXhosa, to which three kids respond “Red!” Not for one moment do the kids sit still.
The teacher knows that small children need to be on the move and repeat what they learn or rehearse familiar work: shapes, numbers, colours.
Other children in the Grahamstown rural surrounds are not as fortunate. Pre-schools have been closing due to urbanisation, a lack of support from farmers and the government’s policy to incorporate them into primary schools.
The growing trend among farm workers to move to townships for higher paid jobs has been a major factor in school closures, said Bessie Nkonce, an Early Childhood Development (ECD) trainer at the Centre for Social Development (CSD) where she has worked for almost 20 years.
The CSD is a self-funded Rhodes University organisation specialising in ECD, and was active in initiating rural pre-schools in the 1990s, but was unable to provide the exact numbers of pre-schools that have closed on farms since then.
Department of Education ECD Co-ordinator Mzwandile Diamond said they have no record of pre-schools on farms, as the schools were not registered.
Examples of pre-schools that have closed because of a shortage of children are Thorngrove at Sevenfountains, and Brentwood and Leeuwenbosch in the Sidbury area.
However, some of these children are now being accommodated at Sidbury Preschool. Cathy Gush, former director of the CSD, said reasons for rural pre-schools closing include the end of a CSD-initiated feeding scheme, a drop in the numbers of young children and sometimes a lack of support from farmers.
In the days when life in urban areas was often being disrupted due to the struggle against apartheid, many families would send their young children to live with grandparents on farms.
Gush said that Leeuwenbosch is desperate to restart, as the number of small children in the area has risen again.
She added that the problem of a shortage of schools becomes valid when schools need to be resuscitated, and that initiating preschools should be a partnership between land owners and the community.
Primary schools on farms started integrating Grade R from 2009, according to Diamond. These schools include Masakhane, Southwell, Manley Flats and Zintle.
Grade R is for children aged between from four-anda- half to five-and-a-half, but Nkonce said ECD programmes aimed at children from age one to six are just as important for holistic development.
If children receive sufficient nurturing at home or at school during this age period, they are less likely to drop out of school or get involved in crime or drug abuse in later life.
Diana Hornby, director of the Angus Gillis Foundation, an NGO, said that pre-schools on farms are mostly driven by NGOs.
The foundation works with Kwandwe Nature Reserve, 40km outside Grahamstown. Hornby believes that government support for ECD is slow or non-existent, and that Grade R classes have taken both students and teachers from pre-schools, resulting in classes that are too small to keep running.
The Foundation started a pre-school in Kwandwe in 2007, and has returned to the Department of Social Development (DSD) to apply for funding every year since.
“To this day, we haven’t had a penny out of them,” Hornby said.Thozamile Mzolisa, DSD acting district co-ordinator, said that no money has been allocated for new pre-schools in 2010, only for those already receiving subsidies.
He said that pre-schools are only one of many projects, including safe homes and street children that also require funding.
But at Farmerfield, school is an event not to be missed. “Oh, they like school,” said principal Monica Khakana, who has to talk on behalf of Zanele Bangushe, the preschool teacher busy with her class.
Khakana told the story of one little boy who came to school coughing, but wouldn’t go home because he liked school so much.
When asked where Bangushe did her training, Khakana replied that she is a volunteer. As a mother of one of the children, Bangushe had told the principal that she wanted to help, as she was not working.
For both the children and cynics frustrated about government inertia around pre-school funding, Christmas could not have come any sooner.
