At a primary school in Brooklyn, Cape Town, teachers reported that while classes start at 7.30am, for many years, they spent the first three or so hours of the day managing the personal challenges the students came in with, and trying to contact social services for support.

“Some of the situations were completely out of control,” says the principal. “We had to deal with issues of drugs, abandonment, violence and sometimes rape. We were lucky if we started teaching by 10, we were so busy calling social workers and the police.”

So what changed? The school experienced a paradigm shift with the introduction of a project called Community Keepers, which involved the placement of a social worker at the school to take care of the children’s social and emotional wellbeing, and to deal directly with any specific problems as they arose, through an established support network of social services in the area.