Small World School

I am a single, disabled parent who recently lost my job and Small World School decided (literally on the first working day of the year, well before the school has actually re-opened) to kick my 3-year-old child out of school after only 3 months of non-payment (in a full year of payments!) with zero reasonable frameworks for settlement. There was no engagement with my context and ZERO care to find out. The school is dominantly white and they say they want to preferentially admit kids of colour but then they are SO quick to exclude them at the very first bump in the road! They say they are a home and a village but really, this is only a place for the rich and elite. Do NOT send your kids here if you care about diversity and inclusion!

If they saw a vulnerable person as a potential asset, rather than as an automatic burden, they could have benefitted from me providing dance classes, photography and video, and strong school policy development. The school has no board and no policies on exclusion, so it is simply the principle who makes all the decisions and who set the very tight and impossible frameworks for payment in this case. I pointed out how this decision and the lack of engagement with my specific context was in tension with legal precedent (using a case where 2 years of fees were outstanding from a private school) but no care was shown. If the school cares about racial accessibility (which they assured me they did - and which they absolutely SHOULD care about, and be actively addressing, facing the currently skewed racial dynamics), they HAVE to be facing the ongoing and probably increasing economic realities of vulnerability in this country and they should be building stronger systems for sustainability into the school, moving forward. I offered this kind of policy work to them, but they showed no interest. In my experience, their engagements with diversity and vulnerability are tokenistic at best.

These things MATTER in the spaces that raise our children and especially when these are the actions of a principle talking about the “future of education” in South Africa.

My daughter has been at small world for just a term, and she is so excited every morning to go there. It’s a truly rich learning environment with an incredible catalogue of teachers and educators from all kinds of Backgrounds. Musicians, artists, architects, and most importantly, moms and dads.
The environment is not polished, but it is beautiful, and everything is geared towards allowing the children to do the important work of play.
When you walk in, you can feel the love and respect for the individual children. That’s what’s important to me.