Rural schooling in South Africa rests on teacher commitment while buildings, transport and training lag

Introduction

Rural schooling in South Africa usually gets described as a list: broken buildings, too few teachers, long walks, combined grades, weak results. The list is accurate enough. What it hides is how the items feed each other, and how much of the whole arrangement rests on individual teachers who simply keep turning up. This paper argues that rural schools are held together mainly by teacher commitment and by principals who manage to keep morale up, while the state’s contribution through infrastructure, learner transport and teacher preparation stays patchy and badly governed (Nkambule, 2022; Ndungane et al., 2024). That setup works until it doesn’t, and the evidence points to it already being under strain (Dlaza and Chinyamurindi, 2025).

The argument runs in four steps. The first section looks at buildings and the journey to school, where failures of governance show up in rand amounts and injury counts (Ndungane et al., 2024; Duri et al., 2025). The second asks who teaches in rural schools and why they stay. The third takes multigrade classrooms, which are common and thinly supported (Taole, 2022). The fourth turns to learner outcomes and to what parents and communities actually do, given how little rural-specific evidence exists (Böhmer and Wills, 2025). Most of the studies used here are small qualitative cases from the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and the Free State, so claims are kept to what such designs can carry (Taole, 2022; Schlebusch and Pele, 2024).

Crumbling classrooms, weak governance and the long walk to school

Start with what teachers say they work in. Nkambule (2022) interviewed 11 teachers from two primary and three secondary schools in one rural community and heard about falling ceilings, potholes in classroom floors, broken chalkboards and not enough textbooks to go round. One school had no staffroom, so a classroom was given up for the purpose, and at another a kitchen had become the Grade R room, with three small children sharing a table. Teachers also felt forgotten, saying officials hardly ever visited to see what was needed. None of this is new to anyone who has been in a rural school. What stands out is the teachers’ sense that things had stayed the same for years (Nkambule, 2022).

Why the conditions persist is the harder question, and Ndungane et al. (2024) offer a fairly blunt answer. They interviewed ten school and senior infrastructure managers in the Chris Hani East District of the Eastern Cape and concluded that the provincial department lacked credible plans, sound systems and effective leadership. The department had no plan for retaining technical staff, and technical expertise was short. They also cite the department’s 2019/20 annual report, which records condition backlogs growing by R7.3 billion because routine maintenance went unfunded. National norms and standards for school infrastructure exist, so the gap is not a missing rulebook. It looks more like a province that cannot plan, track or maintain what it owns, which means new standards on their own would probably change little (Ndungane et al., 2024). The sample is ten people in one district, so this is a pointer and nothing firmer.

The journey to school is the second half of the infrastructure story, and the evidence here is mostly grey. Duri et al. (2025) reviewed academic and non-academic material on scholar transport and found reckless driving, unroadworthy vehicles, corruption and mismanaged funds. In KwaZulu-Natal alone, at least 113 learners were injured and 10 killed in scholar transport accidents between 2017 and 2023, and in Limpopo a minibus certified for 14 passengers was found carrying 58 learners. A reported 21.5 per cent of eligible learners were stranded without transport. In the Eastern Cape, senior officials allegedly paid about R14.9 million to providers that did not exist (Duri et al., 2025). The authors admit that newspaper reporting can sensationalise, and their accident table is probably incomplete.

The national policy sits underneath all this. It covers learners who live more than 5 km from school, and Duri et al. (2025) point out that a 12-year-old walking that distance needs about an hour each way, so the policy quietly expects roughly two hours of walking a day from children among whom, the authors note, malnutrition is common in rural areas. Ndungane et al. (2024) add that school closures push learners into merged schools further away, sometimes without adequate transport. Taken together, the two papers suggest that rationalising small rural schools shifts a cost from the education budget onto families and onto a transport programme that cannot yet carry it. I think that is the strongest practical lesson in this section. A closure should not be approved before transport for the affected learners has been funded, contracted and checked.

Principals deserve a longer look here, since they sit between the broken system above them and the classroom below. In the cases Nkambule (2022) studied, supportive principals encouraged teachers and communicated well, and unsupportive ones left staff divided. Ndungane et al. (2024) describe a provincial department where bureaucracy and political interference delay decisions and where technical skills are short. Put together, that suggests principals are asked to absorb the system’s failures without much authority or training in building maintenance. It also helps explain why some rural schools hold up and others slide, and why leadership quality may be doing more of the work than any programme.

Who teaches in rural schools, and why they stay

The retention evidence is oddly hopeful. Nkambule (2022) notes that teachers in the rural cases stayed out of loyalty to the learners and the community, even though the buildings and resources gave them every reason to leave. The author also observes that this differs from studies linking poor conditions to attrition. Principals made a visible difference: supportive ones kept teachers focused despite shortages, while unsupportive ones fed low morale and division in the staffroom. So the schools were, in a sense, being subsidised by goodwill (Nkambule, 2022). That is not a finding to be comfortable about, because goodwill is not a staffing policy and cannot be topped up from a budget line.

Dlaza and Chinyamurindi (2025) show where the strain might come from. They surveyed 330 rural teachers in the Raymond Mhlaba municipality of the Eastern Cape and tested whether meeting three kinds of need predicted participation in professional development. Only survival needs did, with a coefficient of 0.210 and a p value of 0.026, and these needs, which the authors link to pay, housing and transport, had the lowest satisfaction scores in the sample. Social contribution and self-determination had no measurable effect (Dlaza and Chinyamurindi, 2025). Two cautions apply. The study measures development, not leaving, and the model fit was only moderate on some indices. Even so, it implies that rural teachers whose basic needs are unmet have less room for anything else, loyalty included (Nkambule, 2022).

Recruitment is where the pipeline matters. Pennefather (2023) followed Postgraduate Certificate in Education students placed for six weeks in deeply rural schools on the Wild Coast, 75 students over three years in seven schools. She interviewed 14 of them and four tutors. Living in the community moved students from outsiders to something closer to insiders, and community members acted as brokers who explained local practices, such as why learners returning from initiation behaved differently. Extended mentoring helped more than short, judgement-focused observation visits (Pennefather, 2023). Nkambule (2022) likewise recommends practicum placements in such schools and the employment of teachers from rural areas, who may be more motivated to make a difference at home.

Both papers stop at the school gate, though. Neither follows graduates into employment, so we do not know how many placed students later took rural posts, or stayed in them (Nkambule, 2022; Pennefather, 2023). Pennefather was also the project leader, which the author acknowledges shapes the reading. This is a real gap, because bursary and placement debates often assume that exposure converts into recruitment. Placement may well build the sense of place and agency the students described, but without tracking, the claim remains an inference (Pennefather, 2023; Dlaza and Chinyamurindi, 2025). My view is that the evidence supports rural practicum as good teacher education and does not yet support it as a recruitment strategy.

Multigrade classrooms are a design problem, not just a deficit

Multigrade teaching is not an exotic arrangement. Taole (2022) cites a Department of Basic Education survey from 2014 reporting 5,153 primary schools practising it, about 27 per cent of the total, mostly in rural areas and some townships. Yet the curriculum and assessment rules those schools follow were written for single-grade classes. A teacher with two grades in one period must still plan, teach and record assessments for each, and the same training and support go to multigrade and single-grade schools alike (Taole, 2022). The mismatch is built into the system. A rural teacher is asked to do two jobs inside a timetable designed for one.

Taole’s own study shows the consequence in a narrow but telling way. Four English First Additional Language teachers in four multigrade primary schools in Limpopo’s Sibasa District mostly treated feedback as marking and correction. They wrote answers on the board for learners to copy, and feedback sometimes reached learners a week or so later because the teacher was busy with the other grade (Taole, 2022). Taole reads this as a training gap and argues that teachers need support to give feedback that helps learners improve. The finding fits the time pressure that Schlebusch and Pele (2024) report in the Free State. Four teachers cannot represent a province, though, and the paper does not observe lessons.

Schlebusch and Pele (2024) paint a more resourceful picture. Their 14 Intermediate Phase teachers and six principals, from the Lejweleputswa and Fezile Dabi districts of the Free State, described whole-class teaching of shared content with tasks pitched by grade, grouping by ability, and above all peer teaching, which participants called the most effective strategy. Stronger learners marked work and explained ideas in familiar language. Even so, time was the main constraint, learners struggled to work independently while the teacher was with another grade, and both teachers and principals reported too little orientation in multigrade strategies. One teacher said they had to decide alone which approach might work (Schlebusch and Pele, 2024).

Set side by side, the two studies disagree less than they first appear to. What Taole reads as weak feedback and Schlebusch and Pele read as inventive adaptation may be the same behaviour seen from different angles: teachers improvising inside a system that gave them no multigrade model. The Department’s 2015 guidance, which Schlebusch and Pele (2024) cite, tells teachers to cover the same topics while varying activities by grade, yet their participants did not seem to treat it as a working tool, and Taole (2022) found the same training reaching multigrade and single-grade schools. I would argue that multigrade teaching needs its own pacing guidance, assessment arrangements and initial training. Treating it as a deficit to be endured, which is basically what happens now, wastes the peer-teaching practices teachers have already found (Schlebusch and Pele, 2024).

Learner outcomes, homes and communities, and the limits of the evidence

What do all these conditions do to learning? The honest answer is that rural-specific outcome data are scarce. Böhmer and Wills (2025) compared Grade 4 reading in PIRLS 2016 and 2021 and found the national mean falling from about 320 to 288 points, with the share of learners below 200 points doubling from 13.4 to 26.5 per cent. Learners writing in African languages lost heavily, while those writing in English or Afrikaans showed no significant change, and the lowest eight school socio-economic deciles scored about 62 points below the top two in 2021. Their analysis, however, is by socio-economic status and language, not by location, so rural learners are visible only indirectly (Böhmer and Wills, 2025).

The qualitative work fills part of the gap. Cekiso et al. (2022) interviewed ten Grade 6 learners in the Maluti District of the Eastern Cape and identified four barriers to reading: parents with little schooling, homes not set up for reading after school, low family income, and a shortage of reading material at school and at home. The sample is tiny and the design cannot say how common these barriers are. Still, it fits the national picture of learners in poor schools, and in African-language classrooms, falling furthest behind (Böhmer and Wills, 2025; Cekiso et al., 2022). Rurality, poverty and language overlap so heavily that separating their effects may not be possible with the current data.

Parents and communities enter here, and the picture is more complicated than the usual call for more parental involvement. Mbhiza and Nkambule (2022) interviewed teachers and parents in rural schools and found that parental involvement was mostly limited to helping outside the classroom, with upkeep of the school grounds. Teachers tied the classroom to professional qualifications and curriculum pressure, which shut parents out of academic work, while parents saw the school as a place they could not enter without an invitation and questioned how communication worked. The partnership was imbalanced (Mbhiza and Nkambule, 2022). Parents in Maluti were described as lacking the schooling and materials to support reading (Cekiso et al., 2022), so one reading is that parents are not indifferent but have been handed a narrow role.

That points to a modest, workable change. If schools invited parents and community members into defined learning roles, such as story sessions in home languages or reading groups run by older learners, the school might gain both labour and legitimacy. The evidence for any such programme in rural South Africa is thin, and none of the studies cited tests one (Mbhiza and Nkambule, 2022; Cekiso et al., 2022). Taken as a whole, the literature also lacks a single study that links infrastructure, transport or multigrade conditions to measured learning gains in rural schools. Most links here are plausible inferences from separate small studies (Duri et al., 2025; Schlebusch and Pele, 2024; Mbhiza and Nkambule, 2022).

Conclusion

Rural schools in South Africa are not failing for one reason, and the studies reviewed here suggest they are being kept going by people rather than systems. Teachers stay through loyalty and good principals (Nkambule, 2022), yet their basic needs go unmet (Dlaza and Chinyamurindi, 2025), their buildings are neglected by a province that cannot plan or maintain (Ndungane et al., 2024), and their learners reach school on transport that is sometimes unsafe, late or absent (Duri et al., 2025). Multigrade teaching adds a workload the curriculum was never designed around (Taole, 2022).

Three priorities seem to follow, with the caveat that the evidence is mostly small-scale. First, make infrastructure and transport governance a matter of enforceable provincial planning and funded safeguards, particularly before any school closure. Second, build multigrade teaching into initial teacher education and give rural teachers guidance written for their classrooms (Schlebusch and Pele, 2024; Pennefather, 2023). Third, fund research that separates rural effects from poverty and language, so that future policy rests on more than inference (Böhmer and Wills, 2025; Cekiso et al., 2022).

Reference list

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Cekiso, M., Rabelemane, T., Jadezweni, J., Mandende, I.P. and Dieperink, M. (2022) Factors affecting Grade 6 learners’ reading performance in a rural school in Maluti, South Africa. Reading & Writing, 13(1), article a327. doi:https://doi.org/10.4102/rw.v13i1.327

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