Life Healthcare supports Somerset College Saturday School

The South African education system is currently in a dire state. It faces many challenges such as poor mathematics and science skills, low literacy levels, shortage of skilled teachers, under-resourced schools and low levels of school readiness for children exiting early childhood development (ECD). At Life Healthcare, we don’t only focus on making life better for our patients and our employees, but our compassion extends beyond that as we also strive to make life better for our communities.

One of the ways we are doing this is through supporting a Saturday School for Nomzamo High School run by Somerset College in the Western Cape to not only bridge this education gap within South Africa’s educational system, but to also bring one of our core values ‘Passion for people’ to life. Life Healthcare is funding the Saturday School which focuses on enhancing the mathematics and science skills for learners and educators who come from Nomzamo High School, a non-fee paying school also situated in Somerset.

The Somerset College relationship with Nomzamo High School originally began as unstructured programme a few years ago. However, with Life Healthcare funds, it will be running formally for the next three years with a phased approach starting at Matric level in 2022, then introducing Grade 11 and Matric in 2023, and finally introducing Grade 10, Grade 11 and Matric in 2024.

Currently twenty-five Grade 12 learners are collected from Nomzamo High School by bus every Saturday at 08h00 and transported to Somerset College to attend the Saturday School. The students receive mathematics core and literacy lessons and science lessons in a team-teaching setting for parallel teacher development. Somerset College’s science laboratory is utilised for practical learning giving learners access to modern equipment and materials. The students also receive lunch on-site before being bused back to Nomzamo High School in the afternoon. Nomzamo High School has shown a significant improvement in their overall average pass rate of 24% to 51% since the start of this programme some three years ago.

In addition to funding the Saturday School, Life Healthcare will host a careers morning in March 2022 to empower Nomzamo High School learners with knowledge and information that will further assist them in carving out their future studies and career plans.

Life Healthcare’s funding of the Somerset Saturday School forms part of our corporate social responsibility and investment programme which focuses on health and education initiatives. This is just one of the ways we are making life better for communities and people for the greater good of South Africa.