20 YEARS OF TRANSFORMING LIVES 2021 was a memorable year with many highlights but certainly not without its challenges. We celebrated our 20-year anniversary during the throes of a global pandemic. With new variants of the coronavirus came continued disruptions to our educational programmes and further uncertainty about what the ‘new normal’ would look like as a society living with the pandemic. COVID-19 infections continued to plague the country and the world, but armed with experience from 2020, we felt confident in the innovative practices we put in place to rise to the challenge once again. One of our biggest education programmes for the year was our learning loss programme. Given the many disruptions to the academic calendar because of COVID-19, the goal was to make progress against the learning loss that took place. We therefore employed 28 additional tutors to assist our students with remedial teaching until the end of 2021. Our Matric students also used our new Matric Study Intensive area to study for their final exams. Read more about this on page 13. All of the hard work and dedication during the year paid off as our matric Class of 2021 celebrated a 95% matric pass rate. During all of this, we knew that we still had to celebrate how far our school has come since
4 | CHRISTEL HOUSE SA 2021 ANNUAL REPORT
we were established in 2001. As part of our 20year anniversary celebrations, we reflected on some of our special memories. Watch the 20-year commemorative video here: https://bit.ly/3ytOq5Z Christel House SA’s doors were first opened in 2002 at Bamford Avenue in Athlone. A few years later, the number of students grew as we continued to expand our grades, and Christel House SA was eventually split into two campuses. Half of the students attended school at Bamford Avenue while the other half were at a new campus in Denver Road, Lansdowne. In 2009, Christel House moved to Ottery where our school is still currently located. Today, our beneficiaries include 800+ students from grade RR to 12, 220+ post-matric students and more than 13 000 parents and other members of the communities we serve. “When we started, our teachers went from door to door to recruit children for Christel House. Our prospective parents at the time thought it was impossible. They didn’t believe that you could find a school that was going to give this fantastic education at no cost,” says Carol Kriel, Junior School Principal at Christel House SA who has been with the school since its inception.
