McGregor Waldorf School

The Children

Our children come from a variety of backgrounds. On the playground you can hear Xhosa, Suthu, Zulu, English, Afrikaans, German spoken. Dutch, Austrian, Norwegian and others can at times be heard when children from far away countries visit us.

Our school is currently teaching 149 children of which 41% live in our local community. Most of those children are from Afrikaans speaking Coloured households of which some struggle to make ends meet financially. A most recent socio-economic analysis of the Breede River area show a picture in which 12% of the population is unemployed and 10 % of households are without any income. A large proportion of adults work on the wine and fruit farms where the wages are low and the living circumstances are sometimes very poor. People working in the canning factories, wineries and shops around the small towns earn a better but still a low salary. The analysis states the fairly well diversified economy, the tourism potential due to natural beauty, the reasonably close access to major markets, as the strengths of the area while strong growth in drug-related crime and increasing HIV/AIDS prevalence as the challenges.

Half of our learners are from Black African cultural background. The majority of those are primary school children who live in Nquebela township in Robertson and Zolani township near Ashton. Most of the older students are High school students because the school offers boarding facilities and are from Johannesburg, Cape Town, Sutherland and Zimbabwe.

High school girls

11% of our students are from an English or Afrikaans Causascian cultural background who live in McGregor and surroundings. Those families tend to travel around much more and settle in McGregor only for a few years before moving on again. Throughout the years we have hosted families from overseas – Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, etc – who come for a visit or a set period of time.

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McGregor Waldorf School

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