The Big Read: Miracle of Headstart High

It was hard to believe that this was the same school I first entered a year ago. Then, I'd encountered a disorganised, noisy, dirty school filled with hooligans.

Half-dressed thugs shoved me aside on their way out of the sparsely populated classrooms. Acts of intimacy between male and female learners were openly on display from the moment I came in through the gate.

The young principal hid in his office, too scared to come out and greet his visitor from the local university.

Here in a run-down industrial area south of the city, only the bravest would risk coming to work, let alone school, given the dangers that lurked along the isolated, windswept road leading to Headstart High.

The Grade 12 pass rate was 40%; after all, this was the school that took in academically weak and troublesome pupils denied access to the other township schools.

Within nine months, using a model applied in severely dysfunctional schools, the pass rate shot up to 81%. I had made a huge miscalculation in offering the Grade 12s full scholarships to university if they obtained a bachelor's pass. In my mind, given that we had only nine months in which to catch up on 11 years of poor education, I thought that maybe one, at most two, would qualify. Twelve students achieved B-passes and several obtained distinctions in difficult subjects.

Now, in January, the 12 high school graduates sat with their poor parents in my office. The students were smiling broadly and the parents were very emotional.

It is a lesson forever embedded in my mind that education still has the power to break the cycle of despair and take whole families out of the grinding numbness of poverty to give hope. With their tuition fully paid for, along withon-campus accommodation, textbooks and daily meals, these young people are set for life.

So, on Tuesday, I went back to Headstart High on behalf of a film crew wanting to capture this miracle. The school grounds were spotless. Not a soul was found outside the school.

"Did everybody go home?" I asked the young principal in his strikingly neat cream suit and red tie - the last time I was there I berated him for coming to school in jeans and a T-shirt.

"No, the children are in class and the seniors are writing tests," he said with obvious pride in response to my query about the silence throughout the buildings.

As the Grade 12s of 2014 came into the bare school hall, I was convinced that we had taken a wrong turn somewhere. The young men greeted me with firm handshakes and the young women nodded politely.

All the pupils were neatly dressed in the school uniform. A year ago, it took about 15 minutes to get them to settle down for a motivational talk; this time it took 15 seconds.

"We will start teaching again at 7am," I told the class. "We already do," shouted the pupils. "Well, then we will also end school at 5pm." They laughed; late classes were already in place.

There is a critical lesson here for school change. Success breeds success. In schools that are long dysfunctional, the taste of success for individual pupils has school-wide effects. The 40% jump in the pass rate sends an unmistakeable message to the lower grades that their fortunes, too, could change through nine hours of hard work in school every day.

Long-despondent teachers begin to believe again as they see the abundant fruits of their labour. Affirmation comes in abundance from previously sceptical government officials and from once-weary parents.

Smart children now abandon other schools to come here as Headstart begins to live up to its name. Imagine if every school in our weakest province, Eastern Cape, experienced just one year of dramatic academic success.

We need to put our over-eager government officials on Ritalin, for there is another key lesson from the Headstart experience.

You do not have to fiddle with the curriculum or stress schools with constant annual national assessment tests, or surprise visits by senior politicians, to shock schools into good behaviour.

Simply get schools to do the simple things well - such as teachers who teach every day on an extended timetable to disciplined pupils who are motivated by opportunities beyond school. One year of success - that's all it takes.