#BizTrends2019: The growing disillusionment with traditional education structures

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Niching in education

Niching will not only include skills and knowledge segments but also focus on the emotional well-being of the child. Leadership and stewardship will take centre stage followed closely by coding, entrepreneurship and design. The market appetite will grow in 2019 towards a blended offering of all of these, and smaller institutions that offer these programmes will see an upswing in interest, either separately to South African Schools or included in their offering to parents.

Coaching at school level

Schools and parents are also investing and will increase this investment in additional support in the form of coaching and mentoring from formal professionals, particularly in the high school phase of education where parents feel underequipped to cope with the volatility of their teenagers. Parents are beginning to admit their inability to keep up with the challenges that teenagers face and are seeking out professionals to equip both themselves and their teens with a broader toolbox of skills and coping mechanisms.

The business of education

There has been a rise in independent school groups that focus on creating citizens that are holistically equipped for challenges that lie outside of academia. These are also coupled with business models that make independent, private schooling accessible to lower income groups of the population. Spark Schools and Nova Pioneer are only two of the examples of a blend between good business practice and a citizenry approach to education.

Many of these new independent schools don’t plan to chase an aggressive expansion strategy in 2019 but bed down their existing model and grow their current student base rather than their geographic reach.

Rethinking university

The commonly accepted rule in education that children learn to read until the age of 9 or 10 years old and then read to learn thereafter has taken on a whole new level of application as the channels of knowledge acquisition grow. There are revolutionary learning models, such as the Suits and Sneakers University, that create interpersonal teaching and learning channels hosted in a digital environment. The structure of the university makes it possible for every participant to be a teacher and a student, whilst building their own curriculums and identifying gaps in their own learning path by a virtual mirroring/modelling effect of their counterparts. It combines the social networking power of Facebook with Udemy.

The social unrest and dissatisfaction with the CAPS curriculum, the structure of institutions and the teaching methodologies used are all going to escalate in 2019 and parents will begin to search for alternative supplementation to what children are learning at school as a means of intervening in the shortfalls that currently exist.