Dear parents

Among the more thought-provoking presentations Deanne King and I attended at the recent ISASA SAHISA conference held in the Drakensberg was one given by Professor Thabo Msibi, Dean of Education at UKZN (and the youngest dean in the country at the age of 34) entitled “Mending the wounds: Transformative school leadership in times of uncertainty”. Msibi began his address by recalling how his childhood, spent growing up in a township near Estcourt, exposed him to the harsher socio-economic realities of life from an early age. Describing his academic career, from township school to high school in Estcourt, to UKZN, a Fulbright scholarship to study at Columbia University and, finally, a Gates scholarship at Cambridge, Msibi was intent on acknowledging the vital role played by teachers in steering their students’ careers by recognising and supporting potential wherever and whenever they see it.

Based on Msibi’s own experience of active mentorship by Crispin Hemson, UKZN’s Head of the School of Education, when Msibi was completing his degree in education, he is a fervent advocate of creating opportunities for students from different backgrounds through a critical re-evaluation of institutional culture and its damaging historical blind spots. At the heart of his far more complex presentation was an exhortation to heads to scrutinise daily practice at their schools and to work with their teachers intentionally to create a culture of true equal opportunity for their students. This could be done by ensuring that everyone received the encouragement that would empower them at the outset to make the most of the opportunities on offer. Our mission, accordingly, as heads and teachers at independent schools, is to close gaps in student performance through a rigorous examination, and how it enables and disables performance among different students.

More specifically, at a girls’ school like St Mary’s, where most of the teachers are women, our mission is to empower each other and the girls we lead. It is not enough to gesture towards girl power vaguely or to demand assertive behaviour from every girl with whom we work: we must keep demanding changes to our culture, to the sometimes unproductive ways women and girls operate within it, and to commit to helping each other in practical, instructive ways. I am aware, based on my experience of asking questions in assembly, that girls (and some girls more than others) need encouragement to raise their hands and risk offering an opinion or sharing their knowledge. Despite all my misgivings about the British Royal Family, in assembly last week I could not resist repeating to the girls the uplifting words offered by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex to the women of Nyanga: “I am here with you as a mother, as a wife, as a woman, as a woman of colour and as your sister. I am here with you, and I am here for you.” To be here with each other and for each other – that is our daily bread.

Dr Sarah Warner
Junior School headmistress