​Gauteng News
With children back to school for the 2022 academic year, there has been an ongoing debate about the state of education in the country, particularly in township-based schools. 
The quality of the curriculum, digital divide, infrastructure, inequality, teaching standards, overcrowding, high fees in former "Model C" schools, and teacher salaries are some of the key issues emerging from the debate.
The tag "township school" has always had a negative narrative because of historical circumstances. 
Pre-democracy, townships were hubs of student activism where constant police raids rendered most schools dysfunctional. Desperate for "better education" parents explored enrolling their children to former "Model C" schools away from the townships.
Today, school choice is still widespread, despite attempts by the Gauteng Provincial Government to streamline the placement of children at schools through the online placement system. 
The system remains overburdened with parents scrambling each year for places at these former "Model C" schools citing quality and lower classroom occupancies as the reasons, while the marginalised remain in township schools. 
This begs the question, what efforts is government undertaking to improve the quality of education in schools located in townships? 
Reviewing education priorities set out by the sixth administration in Gauteng, there has been notable progress in improving the quality of the education of the African child across the five districts in Gauteng. 
Working with its partners, including teacher unions and civic society, the Gauteng Department of Education's (GDE) focus has been human capacity, district support, school management, and results-oriented mutual accountability between schools and communities.
The success in this approach results in inward migration by learners from other provinces to attend schools in the province. This then places Gauteng as a province with the second-highest number of learners in the country. Over 102 000 new pupils entered the Gauteng schooling system this year alone. 
While this influx of learners contributes to overcrowding, progressively, the province is changing the face of township schools by expanding the infrastructure portfolio through the construction of state-of-the-art green technology schools. 
GDE is undertaking mega repairs, renovations and maintenance to existing infrastructure, increasing the stock of Grade R classrooms, refurbishing traditional classrooms to smart classrooms, and replacing structures made of asbestos. 
These efforts are paired with the introduction of libraries, science and computer laboratories in a bid to eliminate the problem of underperforming schools. 
Targeting schools in previously disadvantaged areas, the rollout of paperless classrooms has managed to improve learner outcomes, recapitalise and modernise schools in the townships to narrow the digital divide across the system.
The ICT-enabled smart classrooms, equipped with smartboards, educator laptops and learner tablets have transformed schools to be ICT ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) while attracting more learners to key subjects like Mathematics and Physical Science.
By 2021, over 10 000 classrooms were ICT enabled, 10 000 LED boards were installed in classrooms, 20 000 laptops were distributed to educators and 200 000 tablets were distributed to learners. 
The provincial government is also spearheading the building of a network of Schools of Specialisation (SoS) that are providing sector-specific skills in line with the identified high-growth sectors in each district.
About 90% of these SoS are in townships and will in the future assist in addressing skills shortages in Gauteng by creating skilled labour in the township economy that will respond to the re-industrialisation strategy of the Gauteng City Region.
Schools located in townships have seen an increase in social protection, universal coverage of school-going children and enrolment to early childhood development.  
The National School Nutrition Programme which provides one nutritious meal to all learners in poorer primary and secondary schools, reached more than 1,7 million learners in quintile 1, 2 and 3 schools across the province by 2021.
Gauteng is seeing a return in its investment in education, as the province contributed the highest number of Bachelor passes in 2020, at 49 679 as compared to 43 494 in 2019. Learners from township schools are staking their claim at these Bachelor passes and distinctions numbers and the trend is expected to continue with the class of 2021.
The throughput rate has improved from 77% in 2019 to 79% in 2020, accounting for almost 8 out of 10 learners who started school twelve years ago having completed Grade 12 in 2020. This is a mark of progress. The goal is to increase the throughput rate to 95% by 2030.
The Gauteng government affirms its belief that education in townships has a fundamental role to play in fostering a deeper and more harmonious form of human development that will reduce poverty, exclusion, ignorance and oppression.
While the province attends to shortcomings and improving the quality of education, the Gauteng Education Roadmap of 2019-2024 recognises that education cannot be viewed in isolation from its environment – the community and business.
As such government needs a comprehensive societal commitment and action to successfully achieve its aims and objectives in education.