02 Jun 2014

With education being the key to success, there is need to provide a comfortable platform to deliver the knowledge and achieve educational success.

Former vice president, Lt Gen Mompati Merafhe said this during the Swaneng English Medium Primary School golden jubilee celebrations on  May 31. He said Swaneng primary school possessed such a platform and indeed achieved its jubilee.

He stressed that it was important to remember the founding father of the school, Mr Patrick van Rensburg wherever the name of Swaneng English medium was mentioned.

The school was established in 1964 and it did not have a full time teacher when it started and the aim was cater for children of expatriate teachers who were teaching at Swaneng Secondary School.

General Merafhe said the school relied on teachers from the Swaneng Secondary School who during free periods would come and teach the students.

He said as time went on Serowe residents started sending their children to the school for various reasons including that the school’s medium of instruction was English.

Eventually, he said, the school became a government aided institution till 1982 when government ceased aiding privately owned institutions.

He said its financial position was weak but because it received aid from the American government every two years in the form of peace corp teachers.

The Ministry of Education and Skills Development also recommended that the school be run as a private institution and it was in January, 1983 that it did so.

The former vice president noted that today, the school is run by a board of governors and it receives no funding from any organisation hence its dependence on school fees.  

From its inception to date, he said the school has tremendously improved on the academic front. Last year, it recorded a whopping 100 per cent pass in its primary school leaving examinations and the former students of this school hold respectable positions in the society.

He said back then, the school and its infrastructure were nothing to write home about but today the school boasts of a lot of improvements, citing the equipped computer lab with all computers connected to the internet.

Furthermore, General Merafhe encouraged parents to fully participate in the education of their children and not only come to school to blame teachers when their children did not perform well.

The school head, Mr Martin Chiswili said Swaneng primary is a school of higher performance as their usual pass rate is 100 per cent with a quality of A grades ranging between 93 - 75 per cent.

Mr Chiswili said the school enrolment stands at 460 with 40 staff members.

For his part, the former student, Uyapo Ndadi highlighted the importance of nurturing children at a tender age to lay a solid foundation of success.

Mr Ndadi said the children need the parental guidance and parents should be the role models. He however regretted that nowadays some parents cannot be positive role models because of their unbecoming behaviours.

He said some parents buy alcohol for their children while some pastors and parents appear in news bulletins as a result of bad deeds.

The former student implored parents to restore good values that are gradually dying. “Sugar-daddies and sugar-mummies your role is to protect children not to abuse them,” he said.

The school also donated a house to Ms Tirafalo. Ends