George Randell School is a community school catering mainly for lower middle income group families. Hilton Williams, the Headteacher, tells us that 85 per cent of the pupils are black but that colour is irrelevant in the school community. Many of the children come from two big informal settlements in the area and they literally live in a little box but other children come from fairly good homes and the school has  children from a wide variety of backgrounds. 

He goes on to tell us that the school is dedicated to reading; it was already known as ‘the reading school’ and had already won a national trophy for reading programmes. Everyone was therefore delighted to be chosen to work with the University of Fort Hare as a THRASS Absa TalkTogether School because it has meant that the school has been offered things that a school in a lower middle income community would never expect to be offered. For that reason, the inclusion of the school in the TalkTogether project has been even more valuable and the resources the school has received through the project have made a huge difference.

One of the pupils tells us how THRASS has helped her improve in everything but mostly in spelling. She has now become very creative and good at spelling and thinks that THRASS is really nice. 

We see the children working with the Picturechart, the Graphemechart and the Phoneme Grid section of the Phoneme Machine. One of the teachers explains that working with the Phoneme Machine has been very useful for helping children to break down words into separate phonemes and identify which sound they are struggling with, so that they can then go back to their chart and select a specific grapheme to help them spell the word correctly. We also see children in a remedial class working with the Picture Cards and the SING-A-LONG Book. 

The mother of a child now in grade 3 tells us how THRASS has helped her son who had a handwriting problem when he was in grade 1. His teacher had told them they would need to get extra help for him but after he’d been in grade 1 for about two months he started doing THRASS and they saw a major improvement in his handwriting. It is because of THRASS that her son can now write and spell so well, without having had any other help. 

A teacher of isiXhosa to non-isiXhosa speakers tells us how excited she was when THRASS came to the school because she recognised that, if THRASS was applied to isiXhosa, it could make a huge difference to teaching the language, which is based on a phonetic pronunciation, and enable everyone in South Africa to speak it fluently. THRASS has also made a tremendous difference to the way that isiXhosa speakers learn English and has enabled them to speak it really well. 

The video finishes with another teacher telling us that the success of the school is due to Headteacher, Hilton Williams. His personality permeates the whole school and he is a role model for everyone. His attitude to the staff and children has influenced everyone and because of him the school is known as a friendly school.