So what is your excuse?

Even on an overly warm January day, Leeuwenhof is a lovely venue to host an Awards Ceremony. The home of the Premier of the Western Cape, it is one of the oldest buildings in Cape Town – dating back to the Dutch East India Company. With the backdrop of Table Mountain, the rolling lawns proved to be an idyllic setting for the proud award winners of the matric class of 2019. It was debatable who was more proud – the matrics themselves, their parents or the teachers and principals present.

I asked Sister Rose Commins and Deputy Principal Bronwyn Jansen to accompany me so that we could all share in the joy of our two Matric 2019 pupils, Jess Holing and Jade Acton. Jess won her award for coming in the top twenty pupils of the Western Cape with 94% while Jade was rewarded for her 100% in the Art Exam. Springfield was also announced as the 5^th most successful school and, like Jess and Jade, I had the honour of shaking the hands of the Premier and the MEC of Education on behalf of the 80 matric pupils of Springfield and the legion of teachers over the years who played a role in the success of our girls.

It was a joyous occasion where we could all bask in the success of the top schools and the top pupils of the Western Cape. ‘This is one of our favourite events of the year,’ were the words used by the MEC, Debbie Schafer in opening her speech. For a brief moment in time, we could pretend that all was well in the South African educational world. However, it was the Premier himself who reminded us of social ills which the vast majority of Western Cape pupils have to overcome – gangsterism, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, parental unemployment, poverty, homelessness. We were brought back to earth by the presentations to various learners who had overcome extreme personal difficulties to achieve success in their exams.

One young man, neatly dressed in a suit, was led onto the stage by his father. He had been blind for a number of years and one can only imagine the lengths he (and his parents and teachers) had to go to in order to ensure that he had all the necessary support. I can’t even begin to think about how one does Maths when one cannot see. I was still thinking about that when Ridah Khan from Atlantis came on stage. He had been beaten up by gangsters earlier in the year for not joining a gang and suffered head damage after an assault with a brick which resulted in memory loss. His reaction to this setback, as he explained to the press later, was to say: ‘I am not going to throw it all away now,’ and he opted to return to school under a daily police escort. He was to write all his exams at the local police station which he found ‘calming’.

He achieved his Bachelor’s Pass and is scheduled to study IT in the year ahead.

The audience was brought to tears – and to their feet - when the Arrison twins from Scottsdene came on stage. Their mother, suffering from depression after the death of their father in 2017, tried to take the lives of her three children. The eldest son was shot dead, while the one twin, Yaqoob was shot in the hand and Yusuf was shot in the head. Yaqoob pretended to be dead and, after his mother shot herself, carried his brother on his shoulders to a house over a 100 metres away. Helping one another over the next few years, both boys received Bachelor passes with a number of subject distinctions. It was touching to see how obviously close the boys were to one another when they came on stage.

In 1996 after the Paralympics in Atlanta, I invited one of our South African gold medalists, Malcolm Pringle, to speak at a school assembly. He had a number of physical disabilities including a speech defect which made it difficult to follow his words - so his speech was displayed on the screen. After describing the obstacles he had to overcome and the mental fortitude necessary to achieve success, he flashed up on the screen, the following five words to the healthy and able-bodied teenagers in the audience:

So what is YOUR excuse?

There is so much talent at Springfield in so many areas of school life. I hope that 2020 sees all our girls make the mental decision to do justice to these talents. What a year it will then be.

Keith Richardson

Headmaster