A Significant Advantage

Much of the benefit to the disadvantaged child flows into his or her life after school hours. This is because we are not a community of only deprived children, or only affluent families with a handful of gifted but deprived individuals. Rather, the demographic of Ambleside School of Hout Bay (ASHB) reflects the diversity of Hout Bay as a whole. We have a parent body ranging from successful business people and professionals, to domestic workers and labourers. Children are less affected by these differences than are adults, allowing friendships to form quite naturally in the classroom and on the playground.

One of the challenges faced by an impoverished child is that, although someone may be providing the finance to pay fees and purchase equipment, the problem is not one that money alone can solve. Extreme poverty means that many of the support structures familiar to the average middle-class person are absent in the life of the deprived child. It is this absence that further diminishes the family's chances of climbing out of the dark hole of poverty.

ASHB is part of a church community and therefore has a wider range of support networks and relationships than most independent schools. This does not meant that all ASHB families are church members, but rather that the ethos of social action that the church espouses is given full expression at ASHB, with the ongoing support of the local church community. This partnership between school and church has produced many success stories by supporting and empowering a number of families over the past 20 years.

In Hout Bay, although we live in close proximity to one another, our cultures and socio-economic realities are worlds apart. The children at ASHB are learning to bridge the gap with a very simple yet entirely effective solution: friendship. Many of South Africa's economic and social problems are exacerbated by the huge relational divide that still exists in a nation recovering from Apartheid. At ASHB we see that, by befriending one another in a normal and natural way, the children acquire the kind of understanding of one another's lives and cultures that only authentic friendship can provide. On the Ambleside campus we see a bright vision of South Africa's future. As the school is centrally located and easily accessible to the community, our subsidised learners are not commuting to a foreign neighbourhood. Instead they enjoy the experience of diverse communities living closely together, learning from and being enriched by one another. This is yet another unique feature of Hout Bay and our school's contribution towards positive development and upliftment in our country.