02 Apr 2025

Matsiloje Community Junior Secondary School (CJSS) is currently running at 15 stream with 600 students with the same infrastructure it used with the initial nine stream for 300 students with 7 classrooms.

Responding to a question in Parliament on Monday, the Assistant Minister of Child Welfare and Basic Education, Mr Justin Hunyepa said due to this high student enrolment, two outdoors were now being used as classrooms, two labs as base rooms, while the unpartitioned school hall housed three classes.

“We generally have a huge shortage of classrooms and teachers’ accommodation across the country. In 2022/23, the previous government put up a project to expand Matsiloje CJSS through construction of two prefabricated block of classrooms, but the contractor withdrew the contract after only building a slab,” he said.

Mr Hunyepa noted that the ministry was working on modalities of picking up these abandoned projects by either continuing with them or building other structures. On accommodation issues, he said there were 13 two-bedroom houses on shared basis, including married couples and also three bedroom houses all being shared. He said all these houses were for 49 teachers at Matsiloje CJSS.  

MP for Tati East, Mr Tlhabologo Furniture had asked if the minister was aware of shortages of classrooms and teachers’ accommodation at the school, and if so, what was being done to solve the problem. BOPA