Abstract
The South African educational system has undergone various changes. These changes were done to redress the past imbalances of the apartheid government. From a traditional way of teaching in which the teacher was regarded as the centre of knowledge and learners as the passive participants in the teaching and learning process, with a minimum of technological resources and authentic learning to teach the modern way. However, such changes were in respect of developing learners with the knowledge and skills they need to participate in the South African economy, but even through the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) the country experiences 40% of school dropouts and 33.9% of unemployment in the year of 2022.
This then called for the demand of new curriculum reforms, especially to do with the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) that had to be transformed from the way in which teachers teach learners all the relevant subjects and aims to develop more skills using the content they receive through transforming education for sustainable livelihoods. Covid-19 has brought to the attention of everyone that more skills to do with survival are in need in our country and clearly with the expertise learners had received at school, not enough can be done to solve problems and survive and this is evident through the unemployment rate mentioned above.
Transformation means bringing up new ways of conducting leadership, teaching, and learning. Therefore, the study then discovers that other private organisations like Partners for Possibilities (PfP) can integrate school leaders and business leaders from different sectors, especially the agriculture to help generate solutions to socio economic problems like poverty and unemployment around KwaZulu Natal, Limpopo and other provinces. It is evident in this study that through the PfP leadership programme, leaders tend to understand more of ways of how they can redirect education for the benefit of their learners by using the garden as a 3rd learning space and most importantly how they can collaborate with their communities and find solutions to their problems.
In this study, intermediaries like Hoedspruit hub in Limpopo makes it possible for the learners to acquire survival skills that they can learn in the garden such as designing Mandala gardens that help them understand ways on how they can save water in the
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garden while surviving and generating employment for themselves. However, such discovery is vital for this research because most of the schools had challenges of sanitation and water, unemployment, and poverty problems. Perhaps this is an indication that, when leaders open their minds to working with private sectors to redirect education and not only depending from the government, building strong community relations as part of the roles then problems can be solved. In the context of a struggling school system, the development and expansion of financial mechanisms like school food gardens create the autonomy and independence of functional public schools with a record of effective management.
KEY CONCEPTS: Sustainable Livelihoods, Instructional leaders, decentralization of education, Covid-19, School food gardens, Partners for Possibilities South Africa.