Mission
To deliver the CAPS curriculum with care and rigour, in mother tongue first, so that every Manana learner reads for meaning by Grade 4 and finishes Grade 7 ready for high school.
About Manana
Founded by farm-workers and their families. Still standing because we keep showing up for the next child at the gate.
A letter from our Principal
"Our gate doesn't open onto a school. It opens onto a promise."
When I drive in past the borehole each morning, I do not think of MANANA INTERMEDIATE SCHOOL as a building of six classrooms and a borrowed kitchen. I think of it as a promise — to the grandmother who walks her grandchild here at sunrise, to the farm-worker who trusts us with the only book his family owns, to the child who has never been told yet that she is clever.
We are a Quintile 1 no-fee school. We do not pretend that means it is easy. It means our reading hour matters more, our nutrition programme matters more, the way we greet a child by name at the gate matters more. Education here is not an industry — it is a quiet, daily kindness held together by our six teachers and the parents who arrive on Saturdays to fix what the wind broke.
If you are reading this from a city, please know: we welcome you. If you are reading this because your own child will start with us in January, please know: we will see her. We will see him. That is the promise.
— Mrs. Matsemela Lebogang Gwendoline Principal · Serving Manana since 2014
Mission · Vision · Values
Three short sentences we say out loud at every staff meeting.
No flowery words. Just three commitments we measure ourselves against, every term, in front of our SGB.
Vision
A farm school where rural is never small — where our children grow up confident that the language, land and stories of Manana are enough to build any future they choose.
Values
Botho (humanity), Boikgafo (commitment), Boitshepo (honesty), and showing up — for each other, for parents, and for the children, especially on the days when it would be easier not to.
"Re ruta bana ba rona ka lerato — gore ba tle ba rute ba bangwe ka lerato."
— A line our Foundation Phase teacher Mrs Modise wrote on the staff room wall, 2019.