By TIM FISH HODGSON, SILOMO KHUMALO —

It’s a national shame: our visually impaired children face appalling learning conditions.

Children with disabilities, like all other pupils, have a right to quality basic education — now. But the consistent failure by the department of basic education to provide access to adequate schooling, or any schooling at all, to hundreds of thousands of pupils with disabilities is a major threat to their livelihood and dignity.

Between September 2014 and February 2015, at the request of the South African National Council for the Blind, the South African Braille Authority and BlindSA’s joint request, rights organisation Section27 visited 20 of the 22 special schools for visually impaired children in South Africa. We interviewed staff and pupils at these schools and asked them about what they experienced working and learning there. We left almost every school shocked by what we heard and saw. The process as a whole was enlightening, frustrating and emotionally taxing on us both. As a totally blind former pupil at Arthur Blaxall School for the Blind in Pietermaritzburg, Silomo Khumalo in particular struggled to come to terms with the conditions at schools that have, in many cases, clearly deteriorated since he matriculated in 2006.

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