Ferndale Highschool

Running a secondary school in Soweto means working within real constraints: infrastructure that requires constant maintenance, water and electricity supply that can't be taken for granted, and transport logistics that shape school hours and scheduling. Ferndale Highschool operates within this landscape, managing daily timetables around load shedding realities, maintaining facilities that serve hundreds of learners from across the township, and coordinating exam invigilation sessions that depend on stable power supply. The administrative and teaching work happens against a backdrop of managing facilities, managing costs, and keeping operations running when external systems fail. How a school solves these problems—how it teaches, how it keeps the lights on, how it moves exams around load shedding alerts—is as much part of schooling in Soweto as the curriculum itself.