LEADING THE PACK: No-fee school provides a master class in teaching with few resources

I met Takalani Radzuma, principal of the highly successful Bopasenatla Secondary School in Diepkloof, Soweto, early on a Saturday morning. I found him in a classroom making sure learners had arrived on time for extra lessons.Radzuma had been deputy principal for 18 years before he was appointed principal at Bopasenatla in October 2021. At the time, the school had 195 learners and a poor reputation locally, or as he put it, the school “had been written off” and people didn’t choose to send their children there.His first move at the school was reputational: he told his institutional development and support official he wanted to increase the visible role of learners in the school’s life, and he set out to involve as many people as possible in the project. He made sure good stories about the school got told.By the end of his first year, eight articles had been written about the school, and parents began applying. Enrolment grew quickly enough that the school ran short of furniture and had to borrow desks and chairs from neighbouring schools.New teachers were appointed as the roll climbed. Today, the school has 1,268 learners and 39 teachers, but no science laboratory or other additional facilities.Radzuma keeps the school clean and orderly through sheer insistence. Having decided that results, not resources, would become the school’s identity, he and his staff imposed strict discipline to protect the conditions for teaching and learning. The pass rate was 91.1% in 2023, 98.95% in 2024 (one failure) and 100% in 2025. One explanation for the success lies in how the school uses time. The day runs from 7am to 5pm. Children are given instant porridge at 7am and can eat it during an early-morning session that runs from 8am to 8.30am. The timetable is built on one-hour periods, which gives teachers enough time to teach, let learners work independently, conduct some rapid assessments and keep pace with the annual teaching plan.Every spare moment is used for teaching or revision: Friday afternoons are reserved for matrics, and “learners also attend on either Saturday or Sunday mornings, never both, so that they still get some rest”.Unconsciously a practitionerWhen Radzuma took the post, he studied the surrounding schools to learn from their practice and recognised that parent involvement was structurally and not attitudinally low: parents were working long hours and simply did not have the time at home to give their children the support they needed.Rather than sending learners home to work, which would be largely unsupervised in households under real pressure, he chose to keep them at school, where the time could be structured and used.Radzuma has never encountered Harvard’s Data Wise programme. But, developed alongside it, his practice tracks the model closely enough to warrant explicit naming. That’s not because he borrowed it, but because disciplined, data-driven school leadership tends to converge on similar ­habits wherever it is practised seriously.His 18 years as deputy principal provided firm grounding in curriculum management that shows in small but telling details. There are neat piles of Grade 12 books and scripts on and around his desk, which he checks himself. Grade 12 teachers meet weekly and come prepared with a report: which topics were covered, how many activities were set and how many informal tasks completed.Radzuma glances at the mark sheet in these meetings, but the substantive discipline is that the report has been done. The point is the habit of accounting for progress.Data Wise principles. (Graphic: Jocelyn Adamson, 26 August 2026) Teachers are also coached in assessment literacy in an applied form: through relentless practice with past papers, they come to know how examination questions are likely to be asked and teach learners accordingly. The school creates a working data overview through mock examinations and detailed files that track every learner’s marks and progress throughout the year.Radzuma took me through the first-term schedules and showed me how at-risk learners are identified. This is where the “digging into student data” step becomes concrete: it is not an annual audit but a running record, consulted continuously rather than retrospectively. “If you miss one step in the matric cycle, you lose the plot. There just isn’t time to let down your guard,” says Radzuma.Once at-risk learners are identified, teachers work specifically with them to turn their results around. The two-week intensive revision blocks during school holidays function as an action plan with built-in review points: past papers, coaching on question technique and monitoring of whether the plan is working. He notes that the first week of the holidays is deliberately left free so that staff and learners get a genuine break.Instinctive leadershipNone of these actions is labelled “Data Wise” in Radzuma’s own account of his work. But the underlying architecture, such as organising collaboratively, building assessment literacy, creating and interrogating a data overview, identifying a problem, acting on it and checking whether the action worked, is unmistakably there.This was arrived at independently through the practical demands of running a school under pressure.It is worth being explicit about what kind of school this is. It is a no-fee school serving children from communities including Orange Farm and Freedom Park, many of them travelling significant distances each day. There is no organised school transport, and until recently learners simply relied on parents to drop them off when possible.Radzuma is candid about the school’s resources bearing no comparison to those of well-resourced schools in the suburbs, and that he would “be flying higher” with even a fraction of those schools’ funding.Given this context, the school has built a strikingly simple yet effective accountability mechanism for parental engagement: report cards are not sent home or handed to learners to carry back. Parents must come to the school in person to collect their child’s report. If parents don’t come, they do not get it.It is a small, low-cost device that does real work by converting a moment that could easily become passive (a report slipped into a schoolbag and never seen) into a compulsory point of contact between the school and the home. This is especially relevant in a situation where Radzuma has already concluded that parents’ capacity to engage is limited by the pressures of long working hours rather than by a lack of care.Principal Takalani Radzuma.( Photo: Supplied / Mark Potterton) What makes this case worth documenting is not that a principal reinvented an Ivy League framework by instinct. It is that the underlying discipline of Data Wise – organise, understand your data, act on it and check whether it worked – turns out to be learnable through the practical necessities of leading an underresourced, no-fee school in Gauteng. This is a school with poor children, no laboratory, no transport infrastructure and no assumption that parents can be relied on for support at home.Radzuma’s achievement, built from 18 years of deputy principal apprenticeship and hard-won instinct, is a system that does in the real world what Harvard’s Data Wise does by design. Radzuma has built in clever strategies like breakfast and in-person report collection that keep parents in the loop even when the odds are against it. DMDr Mark Potterton is the newly appointed principal of Immaculata Secondary School in Soweto, and director of the Three2Six Refugee Children’s Education Project.This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.