John Matiso, the principal of Manzomthombo High School in Mfuleni, has won the prestigious Excellence in Secondary School Leadership Award and has been named among the top-ten best teachers in the province.
The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) announced the provincial winners of the National Teaching Awards at a ceremony held at Century City on Friday last week. They will represent the province at the national awards next month.
When Vukani visited Mr Matiso at the school on Monday, he was still visibly excited about the award.
The 56-year-old father of five, who hails from Philipstown in the Northern Cape, says he feels overwhelmed to be recognised for his work.
In his youth, he had hoped to be a veterinary surgeon, but apartheid dashed those dreams so he entered teaching instead.
After completing an education diploma at Fort Hare University in 1993, he started teaching at Mfuleni Combined School, which was the only school serving Mfuleni at the time. And later, when Manzomthombo was established, he took up a post there and quickly moved up the ranks, becoming head of department, deputy principal and eventually the principal, a position he has held for the past 17 years.
Looking back on the early part of his career, he says lack of discipline, gangsterism and drug use were not as common in township schools as they are now.
He believes in leading by example and involving his teachers in decision making. It is vital for a school to have committed teachers and staff, and, in all the years he has been at the helm of Manzomthombo High, he has never had disciplinary issues with teachers, he says.
“If you create a platform where the teachers feel that they are part of the process then it is very easy for them to perform their duties with ease and diligence. It does not become a ‘principal thing’ but it becomes ‘our own thing’…And as a result, I’m mostly serving as the CEO of the school more than a principal because the school runs on its own.
“And my role is to bring people on and say here is the school and here is the strength of the school and partnership with the school. Part of my goal is always to try to go an extra mile in terms of the quality of the results that I must produce.
“One example is that you need to consolidate our Grade 8s because you get children coming from different schools and they need to understand the culture of the school. So we start with extra classes there already with the aim of building a Manzomthombo product.”
According to Mr Matiso, the school – which has had about 200 matrics for the past seven years but now has 308 – has consistently scored a matric pass rate above 90% (well up from 48% when he took over as principal) with bachelor passes hovering around 50%.
Describing himself as a family man who strives to succeed at whatever task he takes on, Mr Matiso says knowing the impact he has on children’s lives motivates him to keep going.
