Mahube Valley Primary School in Mamelodi East, Pretoria is in desperate need of more classrooms. Most of the mobile classrooms are overcrowded, with up to 60 learners and they have no electricity. Photos: Magnificent Mndebele
Mahube Valley Primary School in Mamelodi East, Pretoria, was established in 2012 and has been battling with overcrowding since 2014. The school currently has 1,100 learners, with at least 600 sharing one toilet block. There are 14 prefab classrooms without electricity.
A teacher at the school told GroundUp that most of the school’s classrooms can only accommodate up to 40 learners but most of the classes, especially grades 5 to 7, are beyond capacity with almost 60 learners per classroom.
The staff room is currently being used to house grade 4 learners. In free periods teachers are forced to sit in their cars or in a container used as a library.
At least 600 learners have to share one toilet block at the school.
The teacher said the school had been asking the Gauteng Department of Education department for more classrooms but to no avail. Seven more classrooms were needed.
Patrick Makhanya, School Governing Body chairperson, confirmed that the school had submitted numerous requests for classrooms since 2019.
Gauteng Department of Education spokesperson Steve Mabona said additional classrooms had been ordered and would be delivered to the school “in due course”.
The School Governing Body chairperson says the school has submitted numerous requests for additional classrooms since 2019 but to no avail.
© 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.
