Square Hill Primary School (City Of Cape Town)

Square Hill Primary. Even the name sounds like someone tried to describe a shape and gave up halfway. "It's a square... but also a hill... you know what, just enroll your kid." Now listen, 988 kids and 31 teachers. Thirty one. That is a 31.9 to 1 ratio, which means your teacher is basically a DJ at a festival trying to make eye contact with nearly a thousand people at once. By the time Mrs van der Merwe gets to your desk to help you with your times tables, you have already graduated, had kids of your own, and THOSE kids need help with their times tables. This is Southern Suburbs hey, so the parents are probably driving up in their Fortuners to complain about it at the gate while blocking traffic for everyone else. And this is a public school in Cape Town's Southern Suburbs, which means it sits right in that awkward space where the area wants to feel fancy but the WCED budget said absolutely not. The mountain is beautiful, the wind will blow your kid's hat into the next province, and somewhere in a classroom of 32 children, one exhausted teacher is trying to explain fractions while load shedding kicks in and half the class just disappears into darkness. Overall verdict: Square Hill is a proper community school doing a lot with very little, which is honestly impressive, but someone needs to hire about fifteen more teachers before that ratio becomes a crime scene.