Schools as Centres of Care and Support (SCCS): Responding to the Needs of Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children in Rural Areas

This 22-page case study, published by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, discusses the experience of a school-based response to the ever-increasing numbers of orphans and vulnerable children in the rural areas of Southern Africa. Schools as Centres of Care and Support (SCCS) is a model built on the principles of a multi-sectoral partnership approach to tackling poverty, and HIV and AIDS, and other infections. Schools are strengthened to provide quality education and mobilised to function as hubs of integrated service delivery so that children can benefit from increased access to health and social welfare services. The case study is based on the implementation of this model in South Africa, Swaziland, and Zambia. It highlights lessons learned and offers guidelines for implementation in other countries and contexts.

According to the case study, a multi-sectoral approach has proved to be the most effective and comprehensive vehicle for executing this strategy. The approach brings together resources and services that already exist in school communities, drawing in parties from the health, education, social development, and non-government sectors. It is about mobilising resources and services so that they can be better delivered and better utilised. Schools are clustered around education centres or nodal schools to promote sharing of resources and to strengthen mutual support. Each school develops a vision of itself as a "centre of care and support." It establishes a widely representative School Support Team (SST) which leads the care and support programme in the school and community around it. Organisers say that a critical element of the programme is the ownership and drive that must come from the local community. The programme identifies, affirms and strengthens the hands of community members who are already providing voluntary care and support to children and other people in need.

The key principles of this model are:

• schools are effective vehicles for the delivery of HIV and AIDS prevention, care, and support programmes, and integrated services for vulnerable children;
• community participation is essential for this to happen;
• multi-sectoral collaboration is necessary to address the diverse and complex challenges faced by orphans and vulnerable children;
• government ownership, through integration into government policies, plans, and budgets, is necessary for interventions to be sustainable;
• meaningful participation is promoted for children, youth, the school, and its community;
• approaches used are culturally and contextually appropriate; and
• the model builds on existing structures and initiatives.

The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education in South Africa, in partnership with MIET Africa and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, conducted a field test in two circuits of the Ugu Municipal District (south of Durban) between July 2006 and June 2008. The organisers say that the multi-sectoral collaboration of the different government departments, including Home Affairs, Social Security, Health, Social Development, and the South African Police Services, was a success story. The field-testing provided an impetus for the government departments to put into practice the long spoken-of integrated service delivery. The school clustering approach proved a good strategy in bringing resources and services closer to school communities.

Among the lessons learned were the following:

• It is important that the advocacy must be led by the highest office that has committed its political will to the transformation process (transforming schools and the system) in the Department of Education. This advocacy must be visible and permeate all levels, firstly the level of the provincial Department of Education, then district level, and then interdepartmentally.
• Greater focus on multi-sectoral collaboration is necessary in order to ensure integrated service delivery to the children.
• Given the shortage of specialised personnel, a clustering system using the ward and circuit models should be adopted in the appointment of specialised personnel. This would increase access to such services within districts.
• A designated plan within the Skills Development Programme is needed to address the shortage of specialised educational and psychosocial support that is needed to take the strategy across the province.
• The revision of the training material made sure that it was suitable for trainees with a variety of learning styles and that it didn’t suit only people who have a linguistic learning style or who like to work in groups.
• Each directorate should identify how the training material they are already using needs to be adapted to reflect the principle of inclusion.
• It was necessary to train a consistent cadre of trainers in each ward. District officials should be thoroughly trained in the material that has been developed so that they can identify how it fits into the training that they already conduct, and how it relates to their core functions.
• The original training model did not include school-based support visits. However, it soon became obvious that educators would not be able to implement their training if they were not supported with school visits.

The North West province Department of Education in South Africa also adopted the Schools as Centres of Care and Support (SCCS) model. From the achievements and constraints experienced, the following lessons were learned:

• regular communication as well as active participation of all partners in decision making is crucial to ensure sustainability of the partnerships.
• regular visits to schools by education officials and training coordinators is vital for the monitoring of implementation.
• School Governing Bodies (SGBs) and SSTs need ongoing capacity building workshops to enable them to plan and manage school-based outreach activities.
• identifying and selecting dedicated ‘champions’ for all levels of the programme is paramount.
• inter-sectoral networking with government departments and key stakeholders is essential in order to meet the needs of vulnerable learners and caregivers.
• School Management Teams, principals, educators, and SGBs play a crucial role in turning schools into multi-purpose community development centres of care and support.
• extensive psycho-social support programmes need to be conducted at school levels.
• agricultural and other survival skills need to be developed in children whose caregivers often die prematurely.
• cluster Childcare Coordinators and SSTs need to capacitate the local councillors and traditional leaders so as to ensure their support for the programme.
• the participation of parents and caregivers must be maintained through ongoing home visits and attendance at school and community meetings.
• centre managers, if thoroughly capacitated, can play an important monitoring and support role.

Following the two South Africa based pilots, the strategy was rolled out to other countries in the Southern Africa Development Community. According to the report, implementing the SCCS model must take into account the project site’s national conceptual and context-specific framework. While contextual features across SADC Member States in the sub-region share many characteristics, no two sites are the same. Defining these features or differences is an important preliminary exercise.



The report states that a supportive policy framework is a critical enabling factor in taking a pilot programme for OVC to scale and ensuring its sustainability. Within a Ministry of Education, a senior official should be assigned to drive the programme in the Ministry itself and have responsibility for advocating for the project through the system as a whole. However, the Education Ministry as a whole should plan for the inclusion of programme activities in routine planning and the allocation of required resources from the outset. The report also mentions that effective advocacy, management, and fund-raising appear to be significant success factors in the SCCS model and experience has shown that there are indeed advantages to developing and launching such a model from within a Ministry of Education after doing adequate advocacy, sensitisation, and capacity building. Because of the multi-sectoral network of activities and services to be articulated by school-based staff and volunteers, a variety of officials in different sectors such as health, municipal government and police services must co-operate with the OVC initiative. Because the latter benefits are normally provided by families rather than schools, schools must take on new functions in order to educate children who have lost their parents.



The case study concludes that HIV and AIDS are having a devastating effect on Southern Africa, not least of all on the education sector in the country. Because of the nature of the factors that have resulted in the rampant spread of the HI virus, and because of the nature of the education sector, this sector is in a prime position to lead an attack on the socio-cultural factors that enable the virus to spread, and to provide care and support for learners and educators who have already been infected and affected by the virus. The SCCS has been used and tested, both within and beyond South Africa, as a model to mainstream care and support in education.