Western Cape Community Safety Minister Alan Winde said on Wednesday that more funds will be made available this year to improve the safety of learners in the province’s schools.

He visited Forest Village Leadership Academy in Eesterivier outside Cape Town to mark the first day of the 2019 school year.

Some communities on the Cape Flats are notorious for gangsterism and learners often find it challenging to go to school due to high crime rates.

Winde said currently parents are working with their local neighbourhood watches to walk children to school. He noted that more funds will be made available to address issues such as a lack of fencing in some schools.

Meanwhile, Western Cape Education Minister, Debbie Schafer, sat down with learners at Forest Village Leadership Academy in Eesterivier.

It is one of the province’s first collaboration schools which makes use of an operating partner to run the school.

Schafer explained:  “It’s essentially a different model of schooling where instead of having a parent majority on the governing body, we have an operating partner that controls with us to run a school.”

Schafer added that philanthropic funding will allow the school to better its services:

“They also get additional funding from a group of philanthropic donors, because of that, they are able to offer better services, for example at this school they have a social worker and a psychologist which we cannot afford as the Education Department”.