Since the start of the year, the Gauteng Department of Education has recorded more than 40 cases of suicides in the province’s schools, with social workers, researchers and teachers saying they are desperate for more psychosocial support for children and adolescents and that it’s a “no-brainer” that every school needs a social worker.
Hannah Zhihan Jiang writes in Health-e News that about 20% of children under-18 who visited a mental health facility in 2019 and 2020 had a mental illness, according to a 2022 report by Statistics South Africa.
“It makes me feel desperate to make a difference, to do something about the situation,” said Dr Rita Sonko-Najjemb, director of the Body Mind Wellness Clinic in Pretoria, and lead author of a 2019 study of 3 417 learners in 25 schools in the Eastern Cape which found that 17.6% (600 pupils) had suicidal ideation. Of those considering suicide, 73.7% had made plans to end their lives.
Stretched resources
School social workers are the go-to resource for public schools to refer cases of children struggling with learning, behavioural concerns and other mental health conditions.
Most school social workers are employed at district or provincial level, and there are just 606 of them in South Africa, shows the March report of the Social Service Workforce obtained by Health-e News from the Department of Basic Education.
This means that every 23 000 students have access to one school social worker, based on the government’s 2021 estimation of 14m students in the public school system.
Meanwhile, reportedly 9 000 social workers were unemployed in the country in 2022.
The Department of Basic Education employs 2 907 school-based learner support agents, according to the March report, who monitor children’s well-being and refer cases to the social worker.
But there’s a chronic backlog in responding to referral cases – from one week to three months – by school social workers, depending on the emergency level, said Nqabakazi April. She is a social worker who takes care of more than 5 000 students in the Joe Gqabi district in Eastern Cape.
Capacity to only react, not prevent
Karabo Balopedi is responsible for more than 8 000 pupils on the West Rand, Gauteng. In the second quarter of 2022, he said 13 attempted suicide incidents were reported in two months in the 10 schools of which he is in charge. In the worst week, he received three cases of attempted suicides.
“I was stuck because it was overwhelming. I deal with one case, and then the next one comes. You are still trying to figure out interventions for one child, then you get another one who’s in a worse condition,” he said. “It got to a point where I was tired. I was not coping.”
If each school has a social worker, Balopedi said they would be able to monitor the interventions and progress of children. He said his priorities always shift, due to the huge caseload and he cannot follow up with every intervention.
“How do you keep up with the cases? How do you check and evaluate? If there’s progress, how do you change your intervention when you only see that kid once every two to three months? I honestly feel that we need to have one station with two to five schools. If the budget allows, I’d say one social worker for every school,” he added.
‘Environment of hopelessness, helplessness’
Many of the children he encounters grow up without a social support structure. According to Child Gauge’s 2021 report, 19.7% of children in South Africa live without a parent and only a third live with both parents.
“You look at their environment … an environment of hopelessness and helplessness. You have kids who have to become their own parents. It just pushes the child to breaking point,” Balopedi added.
The University of Johannesburg conducted a series of research projects exploring strategies to improve children’s well-being. From 2020, they placed social workers in five schools to collect data and conduct interventions targeting early-grade pupils from six to eight years old for seven months.
Social worker Bongiwe Somdaka was appointed to Lejoeleputsoa Primary School, in Soweto, as part of the project from March 2023.
The HoD for the foundation phase (grade R to 3) Julia Tsogodibane said the school has had no electricity for more than a year and most children are looked after by their grandparents or close relatives as their parents work elsewhere.
Somdaka observed that because children undergo traumatic experiences at home like abuse, neglect or family fighting, they go to school with anger issues.
Teachers, said Somdaka, are struggling to deal with these “misbehaving” children because they cannot get hold of parents.
Unemployed social workers
There are, she observed, 9 000 unemployed social workers available to be placed in schools to help prevent children from committing suicide or dropping out of school.
She graduated in 2018 and was unemployed until she was recruited to be part of a research project at the University of Johannesburg. But she will have to start another round of job searching at the end of her contract.
“I have been applying. I don’t know how many times I have applied. I don’t know how many times I used the application form,” she said.
“Schools need full-time social workers… not only for the children or teachers. It’s for community members as well. It’s for parents. It will be a solution to many problems.”
Health-e News – ‘Every SA school needs a social worker’ (Creative Commons Licence)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Child and adolescent mental health services in crisis, report finds
Report flags huge gaps in children’s mental health services
High suicide intention rate among students – SA study
SA has higher suicide mortality that most of Africa – IRR
Psychiatrists group urges government to spend more on mental healthcare