Allendale Secondary School (Witbank)

Allendale Secondary School in Witbank, Mpumalanga. Witbank. The name alone tells you everything. You are not in the Winelands, you are not near the mountain, you are in Witbank where the air has texture and your school is called Allendale like it is a retirement village in Brackenfell. 480 learners, 23 teachers. That is a 20.9 to 1 ratio, which means your teacher is basically a taxi driver who took on too many passengers and now everyone is sweating and nobody is comfortable. One teacher looking after 21 kids and somehow only 64.7% of them made it through matric. That means roughly one in three students went through the whole journey, survived Witbank winters and load shedding and whatever is happening in that classroom, and still did not cross the line. Eish, bra. 64.7% pass rate at a public school is not a disaster, but it is not something you print on a banner either. You are not putting that on the gate. The gate probably does not even have a banner, just a security guard who waves at everyone because the lock broke in 2019. Still, 480 kids showing up every day in Witbank with 23 teachers doing their best, that is actually something. Public school in Mpumalanga is not for the faint-hearted and if you made it through, you are built different. Overall verdict: Allendale Secondary is basically a pressure cooker in the coalfields, the results are not always pretty, but the kids who survive it are genuinely hard.