My first teaching job in South Africa was at a government school in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
This was a true community school: families and children from all walks of life, reflective of South Africa in every sense, socio-economically and otherwise. Parents were so involved that when we planned a classroom clean-up, they arrived after hours with their children to help. A principal trusted her staff to teach the way they taught best.
It was the kind of school we imagine when we picture a great South African school.
But the moment that 'started' kolab. came later, when I moved into the private school sector and understood what I had not had.
The difference was not the whiteboards or the textbooks. It was exposure to international pedagogical thinking: the theory of why children of different abilities take in content differently, the reasoning behind a method, not just the method.
I learnt an enormous amount that first year. The uncomfortable part was realising I had not had access to this information previously. This was no failing of the school; there is simply no extra money for that level of professional development in the government system.
That is the inequity that stayed with me. Not resources. Understanding.
So, when I built kolab., it was never going to be for children. Education begins with the teacher. When she understands why she teaches something the way she does, the children grasp it more easily. Everything I had seen was built for the child. Very little was built to help the teacher understand her own craft. The child is the ultimate beneficiary. The teacher is where you intervene.
Six and a half years in, here is what I got wrong: I assumed people would see that.
South Africa has a preoccupation with matric results. Recently, this has shifted to include Foundation Phase, which is right, but the same instinct persists. Funders want quick movement in child performance. Teachers often experience kolab. as one more thing on an impossible workload, rather than the thing that makes planning easier.
Both are impatience with something that is structurally slow.
A teacher has to understand her content, navigate the curriculum confidently, and choose the right skills for children who arrive in Grade 1 with wildly different starting points.
Those starting points are not evenly distributed. Many South African children do not attend preschool at all. So a Grade 1 teacher stands in front of a class where some children arrive having been read to at home, talked with, and grounded in the fundamentals — colours, shapes, sequence, measurement — and others arrive with none of it. Higher-income families take that foundation entirely for granted. It is not the norm in this country.
She teaches a year, then does it better the next. Every year builds confidence and agency.
And the slow part is not really the technology. It is getting enough people on the ground to support these teachers, work alongside them, and see what is genuinely changing.
That is the intervention. It takes years, and it does not photograph well at the end of a financial quarter.
kolab. is not a silver bullet. No serious intervention is. Anything comprehensive enough to genuinely develop a teacher's practice is slow, and I would be suspicious of anyone promising otherwise.
The child is who this is for. The teacher is how you get there.
learn. teach. grow.