On a cold Saturday morning, while most of the country was having a lie-in, more than sixty pre-school practitioners took their seats in a conference hall in Saldanha Bay.
Nobody made them come. They came because of the children who would be waiting for them on Monday.
The workshop was built on a simple idea. Instead of each organisation training the centres it already works with, everyone opened their networks and put them in one room. Breadline Africa, The Reach Trust and ORT SA CAPE brought together the pre-schools they support, along with referrals from the Peninsula School Feeding Association, ELRU, Grassroots and the Saldanha Bay Municipality. Six West Coast communities were represented and the venue was filled to capacity.
At the centre of the training is Thabo: a small boy in a story, in a place that looks like home, doing the ordinary things he does every day. When children see themselves in a story, they lean in. And when they lean in, learning begins.
The day was practical. Practitioners explored how to use picture books, drawing on scenes like shopping with fruit and vegetables, to build skills such as counting, sorting and identifying shapes. They also looked at how to bring caregivers into a child’s learning at home, including those who cannot read, through conversation rather than worksheets.
“Practising with the materials increased my confidence to use them in class,” said Nasreen Parker of Guiding Journey Educare.
Everyone left with a certificate and practical resources they could use the following week. But what matters is what happens next. Each practitioner takes those ideas back to a staff room and passes them on to colleagues and even parents. The workshop reached over sixty people. The learning will reach hundreds of children nobody in that hall will ever meet.
It is Women’s Month, so it is worth saying plainly. Early learning in South Africa is held up by women running early learning centres on very little, many of them unregistered and unsubsidised, who gave up a Saturday to get better at work that is too often undervalued and under-resourced. Investing in them is one of the smartest and most effective things anyone can do for a child’s future and the thing most often overlooked.
This partnership was made possible by Mining Indaba and it doesn’t have to stop here. The next workshop is planned for 50 more practitioners in Mpumalanga and we would like to keep going.
One Saturday, seven organisations, more than sixty practitioners and a ripple none of us can see the end of.
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