Building relationships is key to making a difference in young people’s lives, says a Meadowridge faith-based organisation that runs academic and life skills programmes for disadvantaged and at-risk primary school pupils.
The LifeMatters Foundation was established in 2002 by Meadowridge Baptist Church, now Connect Church, to serve the youth of the greater Constantiaberg area.
It provides academic support for struggling Grade 2 and Grade 3 pupils in underprivileged southern suburbs schools.
Through the Shine Literacy Hour programme, children learn at their own pace to overcome areas of difficulty; the Fun with Numbers programme helps Grade 2s build a solid mathematical foundation; and the life-skills division provides counselling, camps and a teenage awareness programme.
Kayla-Tess Pattenden, a social worker who runs the teenage awareness programme, told the foundation’s AGM in Meadowridge last week that traumatised children struggled to focus on anything other than survival, and they could not learn or function when feeling unsafe.
However, everyone they met in their lives had the potential to help them, she added.
There had been a spike in referrals to the foundation’s life-skills section in the wake of Covid, said Alneré Turck, LifeMatters executive director. And it had also seen a rise in substance abuse among pupils. Cases of abuse and neglect and pupils being exposed to traumatic events had also added to the workload for counsellors.
“There were quite a few emergency debriefing sessions that were needed. There was a teacher that committed suicide, so a lot of the children needed debriefing, she said.
“At Steenberg, there was gang violence that happened outside of the school, and the children saw some rather traumatic things, and so they needed debriefing, and at Ithemba Primary, there were quite a few children who were exposed to the violence when the taxi violence was happening.
“What happens in those situations is that all of our counsellors will go into the schools and debrief, almost on mass, the children that need debriefing,” Ms Turck said.
The meeting heard that more than 1200 children had received either life-skills or teenage-awareness-programme counselling through LifeMatters last year, and more than 400 pupils had attended the literacy programme.
“For those in our programme, their average increase was 41% in marks, notably higher than the kids who are not in our programme who are about 20%,” said Kirsty Nortjie, the head of the literacy programme.
Nicci Bowley, the head of the numeracy programme, said pupils in the programme saw, on average, an improvement of 37.8% in their marks compared to an average 23.5% improvement for those not in the programme.
“The results on paper are encouraging, but yet we are also aware, we aren’t able to quantify the impact the one-on-one time has in building confidence and self-esteem for a child who realises that an adult shows up for them weekly and is investing in the education and in their lives,” Ms Bowley said.