South African entrepreneurs have good ideas for bringing private education to the masses

The Economist:

MANY MBA students dream of striking it rich. Stacey Brewer dreamed of reforming education. Ms Brewer worried that South Africa’s education system was perpetuating racial divisions with its combination of substandard public schools for the black majority and elite private schools for a mainly white minority. So in her MBA thesis for GIBS Business School in Johannesburg, in 2011, she produced a blueprint for a chain of private schools that would use standard business methods (such as economies of scale and technological innovation) to provide cut-price private education for the masses. The chain, SPARK, now operates four schools and will open another four in 2016.


Everything about SPARK Bramley, in a mixed district of Johannesburg, bespeaks aspiration. The pupils are racially diverse—about 80% are black and the rest are white or “coloured”, to use the ugly local term for mixed-race—but they are all in smart uniforms. The school has some of the flavour of a conventional private school with its emphasis on character and discipline. But it also uses lots of unorthodox methods such as chants and dancing. The pupils start each day by reciting a creed that includes the phrase, “I am a SPARK scholar and I am going to university.”