After School. In Home. In Community.
Western Cape Education Department
The Western Cape Education Department provides finance for training, educational resources , Monitoring and Evaluation and NGO coordination.
The advent of Covid-19 has caused formal Education to pivot away from being solely reliant on the school and allow for learners to learn in a range of different ways that would protect them against the type of shocks experienced during Covid-19. This includes Online Learning, in and after school support and @ home learning including parents and caregivers who support the learner outside the classroom.
YearBeyond is a youth service programme providing service experience and opportunities to thousands of youth, including WCED @ Home Learning youth (called YeBoneers). It is funded by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, the Jobs Fund and various donors.
YearBeyond has a number of programmes working with learners, the largest being the YearBeyond Academic Programme. In many schools this together with the @Home Learning programme provides a continuum of support to learners.
More about YearBeyond Academic: These YeBoneers work with academically under-performing Grade 3 and 4 learners and provide literacy and numeracy support, using the teaching at the right level methodology.
As a youth service programme YearBeyond provides all YeBoneers with a structured youth development programme to develop their personal and professional skills and ensure they are work ready at the end of the experience. This journey of support is captured in the graphic below.
All YeBoneers receive a service certificate, a bespoke reference letter and a competency development report at the end of their time with YearBeyond. YearBeyond also provides pathway and progression support to ensure at least three quarters of the youth in service transition into study or work at the end of the experience.
The DEDAT Work and Skills Programme incentivises the stipends for the interns placed during the WCED @Homelearning programme rollout with the aim to provide unemployed youth with “hands-on” work experience as well as support the partners.
DEDAT supports this partnership because it provides unemployed youth between the ages of 18 to 35 years in the local communities to access meaningful work experience, professional development training, mentoring, and coaching for the duration of their placement. This will increase their employability and provide a career pathway for young people while contributing to the upliftment of their community and improving the education system.
NGO Hope Through Action ( and its partner Score) lead the entire @ Home Learning programme working together with 11 Implementing partner NGO’s in the WCED districts.
Hope Through Action Foundation, a Western Cape based NGO, has built three Sports Centres in order to change the trajectory of thousands of young people’s lives, bringing hope by creating opportunities. The Mbekweni Community Sport Centre (near Paarl) was built in 2010, the Groendal Centre (near Franschhoek) was built in 2015 and the third Centre at Malmesbury opened in 2019.
Recognising the need for early intervention, HTAF has also built schools/educare centres adjacent to the two centres in Mbekweni and Groendal. In Mbekweni, the Educare centre has over 200 children from 6 months to 5 years old and provides an approved curriculum, feeding programmes and a crèche thereby allowing parents to be economically independent. The school in Franschhoek provides education to over 100, 6 to 10-year olds.
In addition to the above, we opened our Groendal (Franschhoek) Learning Centre in February 2019. The focus in the Learning Centre is to embrace the fourth industrial revolution, providing our communities with empowerment opportunities to incorporate the digital and information age in their lives.
Given the success of the Learning Centre in Groendal, a two-story Learning centre was built next to the Sport Centre in Malmesbury. The construction has been concluded but we are currently in the process of equipping the centre with the needed resources before our doors open later in 2022.
A hybrid system is followed in Groendal, with a mobile solution (30 tablets) taking the learning centre services to the partner ECDs in the community. We hope to establish the same hybrid solution in Malmesbury and Mbekweni.
Initiatives at the Learning Centres include, but is not limited to, the following:
- Resource Hub : Teachers in ECD and other educational programmes
- IT Learning Centre : Future technical skills development (4IR)
- Training facility : Skills development with a focus on employability (including accredited training)
- Library/Reading room : Safe space to encourage reading and do homework and research
- Outside play/environmental area : Safe and organized space for various types of play and learning
SCORE
SCORE, a South African NGO, with more than 30 years of experience
in the field of sport and community and youth development, is the implementation partner for all the Hope Through Action Foundation’s sport, child and youth development programming and manages our sport and education centres.
The Val de Vie Foundation provides ongoing @ Home Learning programme guidance and support. We also fund Stationery Packs, Wordworks TIME material and website development.
The Foundation aims to provide a better life for all and believes that Education is the key to building a sound middle class. We have been working with the Western Cape Education Department for over two years as we all sought to address the covid-19 induced learning losses. This unique programme has been fully embraced by every level of Education with an openminded spirit and can do attitude. We are honoured to be part of the programme.
Wordworks is proud to be a partner in the WCED @ HomeLearning project and to supply TIME home learning educational material, training and support.
Wordworks is a South African non-profit organisation that focuses on early language and literacy development in the first eight years of children’s lives. Since 2015 we have worked in under-resourced communities to reach those adults best positioned to impact on young children’s learning – community volunteers, ECD practitioners, teachers, parents and caregivers.
In 2020, working within the WCED’s @ home forum in the context of Covid learning losses, we initiated the development of the TIME programme to provide affordable, practical and fun daily activities to help build young children’s foundational skills. TIME contains early literacy content from Wordworks, early mathematics content from RED INK, and stories from Nal’ibali, African Storybook and Book Dash. Since 2021, the TIME materials have been shared for distribution to over 100 000 homes through more than 400 schools and 24 NGOs across several provinces.
Nal’ibali provides bilingual reading material (Nal’ibali supplements) to the project, and has trained both Yeboneers and mentors on how to use the reading materials.
The Nal’ibali supplement is a 16-page bilingual reading resource in newspaper format that comes out once a month. Each edition includes 3 stories, plus tips and activities to help adults support kids’ learning. Kids can fold their own storybooks, building up their own home libraries.
Nal’ibali also has a free digital library with more than 1,000 stories and a WhatsApp chatbot with self-paced training and stories on demand, which are available to support the project.
Singakwenza aims to improve access to quality Early Childhood Development (ECD) for young children in economically disadvantaged communities.
We educate, empower and support their practitioners and parents to create a safe, loving and stimulating environment, which enables them to develop resilience, learn through play, and reach their full potential. This is done through a sustainable learning program that uses educational toys and teaching resources made entirely from household packaging that you would usually throw away.