With professional and business credentials as long as your arm plus academic credentials to boot, Sizwe Nxasana could have chosen to leave SA for greener, less tumultuous pastures. Instead, he chose to stay and try to make a difference, resulting in the birth of Future Nation Schools as his contribution to solving SA’s education problems.
Although Nxasana’s journey as an unlikely educationist began in 2017 with the opening of Future Nation’s two campuses in Gauteng, the seed had been planted decades before, he tells me when we meet at the Fleurhof campus. His unassuming office on the sprawling premises has barely enough space for a desk, a few chairs and a kettle to boil water.
“My father,” he says, “was a maths and science teacher and in my 20s, after qualifying as a chartered accountant, I became a lecturer at the University of Zululand. Education was always my interest and passion. That’s why when I was in the corporate sector I was chair of the social investment entities – the Telkom Foundation and First Rand Foundation – to direct their focus towards education.”
Often a trailblazer, Nxasana established the first black accounting firm in KwaZulu-Natal, Sizwe and Co., which morphed a few times before merging with Grant Thornton to become SNG Grant Thornton. Later, as CEO of Telkom, he piloted its public listing, turning it into a rare success story among state-owned companies. Next, Nxasana became First Rand’s first black CEO. His predecessors had all been founders of the banking group.
He explains his seemingly all-consuming passion for education thus: “As a country we talk about unemployment and inequality. It’s very difficult to fix those things and grow the economy without a solid education background where we impart and develop skills among young people. It’s a very fundamental belief I’ve always had.”
The decision to start Future Nation was a family call by him and his wife, Dr Judy Dlamini, herself a businesswoman and chancellor of Wits University. Before Future Nation, the couple were involved in education in various ways, from running a family bursary for needy students to teaching mathematics in underprivileged schools.
“The discussion was always about what can we do as a family to improve education because both of us are quite passionate about it. For me particularly it was important to roll up our sleeves and really immerse ourselves in education so that we understand what happens in that space at a very detailed, practical level.
“Setting up the schools using our retirement money was a natural progression from that,” Nxasana says.
One of the first things the Nxasanas did was to travel abroad to study pioneering teaching methods and curricula. “For me the starting point was to understand where the world is going when it comes to the development of skills, competencies and knowledge, and what approaches are out there that are innovative and interesting that have relevance to our learning and teaching conditions in SA.
“We wanted to find out what, for example, the likes of Singapore, Pakistan, Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries were doing. The project-learning approach is a big differentiator because traditionally teachers at schools were the fountain of knowledge but we all know the world has changed and needs people who have very different skills and competencies.
If you believe that you are the only one who knows it all as a teacher, you probably don’t belong in our environment
“Most schools still teach in the traditional way, where the teacher lectures to the class. But young people these days bring a huge amount of prior knowledge into the classroom. So the teacher plays a very different role of facilitator. Obviously, because of your experience and training as a teacher, you have tools to guide the learning process. If you believe that you are the only one who knows it all as a teacher, you probably don’t belong in our environment.”
Secondly, Future Nation sent its first group of teachers to California, where it had partnered with a chain of schools that had been doing project-based learning for a while.
“When Future Nation opened it had a complement of about 1,400 learners and 120 teachers at its Fleurhof and Lyndhurst campuses, which numbers have remained steady. We started small because we were doing something that has not been done in our context, especially for schools that cater for lower to middle income communities.”
And why the name Future Nation? “As Africans we can’t just be consumers of other people’s knowledge and products. We all talk about how Africa, with its 1.2-billion people, has a young population but unless the continent is focusing on producing skills and competencies that are truly going to leverage and benefit from our young population we will forever be consumers of other nations’ products, solutions and knowledge,” says Nxasana.
“For me leveraging off our young population and giving them, as we do in a small way at Future Nation, the ability to be proud in themselves and what they can do and an understanding that they have a place in society and the world and they matter, creates a foundation for creating entrepreneurs and leaders of our society. We are creating a nation of the future, and that can’t happen by accident. You must be quite deliberate.”
He adds that Future Nation sought to use “content that is indigenous, relevant and local, but with a global outlook”. For example, when teaching accounting “it does not help to use case studies of businesses in the US or Europe. Our students are learning about business from the tuck shop to the large businesses in the SA context and how that is integrated into the global economy and how technology plays a role.”
But Future Nation’s offering is more than about just mathematical prowess and technical innovation skills. According to Nxasana, the schools seek to produce well-rounded pupils who become “upright people” attuned to broader social issues.
“It is about values. Good values throughout the world are under attack. Values of respect, of integrity, of how to live with one another and having passion in what we do. When you look at where we are as a country or as a continent, it’s true that schools can a play a very important role in building upright societies that uphold those values.
“A lot of our students come from communities where values are undermined, where schools are proxies of society. As schools we carry the responsibility of building those values to try to eliminate the malfeasance, the criminality and corruption. When young people come to our schools they must understand that they will be part of a community that practises the values that are really important in building an upright society.”
Nxasana describes the culture at Future Nation as “one of fun, which is how schools must be. But clean fun. At the same time excellence is important. The pass mark for every subject is 60%. If you don’t get 60% in one or more subjects but get 70s and 80s in others, you still do not progress to the next grade.
“It’s important because when we set high expectations for ourselves as teachers and set the same expectations for students they start to think differently about their own capabilities. If you get 65% at our schools it’s nothing to brag about.
“It’s an issue we disagree with a lot of parents on when their children first come here. If parents are not willing to come on board to work with us to help their children achieve at least 60%, they probably don’t belong in our environment,” Nxasana says.
To enable the schools to fulfil their mandate they are supported by an ecosystem comprising Sifiso Education and Technology (which addresses the role of technology in education) and Sifiso Publishers, which produces academic and general literature “in indigenous languages or written by indigenous people”. The two, together with the schools, are housed in the holding company, Sifiso Learning Group (named after his late father and son, who shared the same name).
I’ve grandchildren who are Venda speaking and there is absolutely no reading material for young children
Nxasana singles out the scarcity of reading materials in African languages as one of the challenges in the education system. “If you are Zulu-speaking there’s a bit of material you can read in isiZulu or isiXhosa. I’ve grandchildren who are Venda-speaking and there is absolutely no reading material in TshiVenda for young children. The same applies to other languages such as Sepedi, Xitsonga and isiNdebele.
“As a country we say our children can’t read for meaning by age 10 but we can’t solve that problem if there is nothing to read in the languages that are spoken in more than 80% of homes.”
For now the language of learning and teaching at Future Nation is English. “Obviously, we operate within the CAPS curriculum, where the languages of learning and teaching are English and Afrikaans. None of our indigenous languages are official languages of learning and teaching but we encourage the use of indigenous languages because it is about developing terminology and lexicology in our indigenous languages, especially in some of the technical subjects.
“For example, Afrikaans is a very young language as an academic or commercial language. That’s why it uses a whole lot of borrowed words because they previously didn’t exist. Why can’t we do the same for our indigenous languages, which will make it easier to explain concepts?”
Although he is CEO of a private school entity, Nxasana strongly advocates the improvement and strengthening of the public school system. “I fundamentally believe in improving the quality of the public education system. That’s why I continue as co-founder of the National Education Collaboration Trust and make policy inputs in forums such as the basic education department’s lekgotla as well as in debates about the governing party’s education policy, especially on the issue of initial teacher education.”
Which brings our conversation to another of his bugbears – teacher training. “There is,” he says, “no education system that can be better than the quality of its teachers.”
“We talk about 21st century skills and competencies. The question is how do you develop those if teachers don’t have the skills themselves?”
SA is my home. Both my wife and I truly believe that all of us can make a difference
Again, Nxasana is not all talk. Once his mind was made up to “roll up his sleeves” in helping tackle the nation’s education challenges, the Fort Hare-trained chartered accountant immersed himself in a teaching post-graduate qualification at Unisa. And he is not done. At the age of 65, he is now studying towards a PhD in further education for working teachers through Aalborg University in Denmark. “Having gone through it myself I found that initial teacher education in SA is really poor. For instance, we can’t produce more children who are taking maths when the system is producing declining numbers of teachers in the subject.
“While it was a great idea to separate the basic education department from the higher education department, the problem now is that the department that produces the teachers often does not work closely with the department that receives teachers. For example, while the basic education department has introduced curriculum areas such as coding and robotics, very few of the universities are producing teachers that are qualified and competent to teach those subjects.”
And why has he chosen to remain in SA? “SA is my home. Both my wife and I truly believe that all of us can make a difference. I’m a beneficiary of the democratic order we have and a lot of the policies that the SA government has put in place since 1994. This is a great country and that’s why for me it’s about being part of the solution, working with the government and various people. I believe that education is about young people, who are 100% of our future.”
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